Joe Conason on where we are with Iraq. This thing could go several ways but none of them are very pretty.

Did you grow up in Los Angeles? If not, skip to the next item. If you did, keep reading.

Fellow Angelenos: There's a great website called L.A. Radio that tracks the local radio personalities of yesteryear with articles and indices. Usually, it's a subscription (pay) site but for this weekend only, you can browse for free. Instructions on how to do this are on the first page, as is a salute to The Real Don Steele, a local legend of Los Angeles radio.

I've read a few pieces on there. The first guy I looked up was "Sweet" Dick Whittington, who I followed fiercely on KABC from 1966 through 1968 and then on KGIL for ten years after that. (He should not be confused with another local broadcaster, Dick Whittinghill, who was on KMPC from about the time Marconi invented the radio until 1979.) Whittington was one of the freshest, funniest talents to ever work a microphone and some of the things I heard him say are still part of my repertoire of silly things to say. If you heard him today, you'd think you were listening to a guy imitating the less controversial, funnier aspects of Howard Stern and Don Imus, but Whittington was doing that kind of thing before either of them. I wonder if anyone has any tapes of vintage Whittington.

We cover many important topics on this site — politics, comics, movies, my cell phone problems — but none more important than Baby Pandas. Baby Pandas, as you well know, are the cutest thing in the world.

There is one more Baby Panda in the world today. Bai Yun, a giant panda at the San Diego Zoo, gave birth this afternoon at 1:31 PM. So far, there are no pictures of the cub and zoo authorities haven't gotten close enough to determine its sex. But it's a Baby Panda and any day now, we should get to see it in all its unparalleled cuteness.

In the meantime, the zoo has some video clips on this page of its website. There's one there entitled "Panda Birth" that shows the announcement and some footage of Bai Yun in labor. There's another one called "Giant Panda Birth Watch" that will show you how she got pregnant. One of the reasons pandas don't mate more often is probably because they never have a minute of privacy.

At a Comic-Con International a few years back, I met a photographer named Greg Preston who had an interesting project. He'd been travelling the country taking photos of comic book and comic strip artists in their studios. The pictures were magnificent. Not only had he gotten shots of some of the best in the field, not only had he gotten some important ones (like Carl Barks and Jack Kirby) before we lost them…but the photographs were good photographs. They looked like the people and in most cases, captured some key aspect of the person's personality. You could just look at one and understand a little more about a favorite cartoonist or illustrator.

Greg was then looking for the right situation to put them in a book…and I'm delighted to say he found it. Dark Horse has recently issued The Artist Within, a handsome hardcover that needs no hard sell from me. If you're not convinced it belongs on your shelf, go look at a few samples of what's in it. Then click here to order a copy from Amazon. I'd gush further but the photos really speak for themselves.

Turner Classic Movies is currently running a "salute" to Joan Crawford. I put in the quote marks because they're running all of her best movies and then, in the wee small hours of tomorrow morning, they're running Trog, a 1970 film that pretty much suggests the following scenario. Someone approached Ms. Crawford and said, "Joan, dear, you're getting along in years and your health isn't great. You may have only enough time left on this planet to appear in one more movie. Have you given any thought to what you'd like to do as your final project?"

To which Joan Crawford replied, "Yes. I've been thinking…I've appeared in so many great movies, so many true classics, that I think I ought to cap my career with the worst movie ever made. I think it would be a wonderful trick to play on my many fans. I want them to all rush to see a film because I'm in it and then just sit there in the theater, thoroughly appalled — and hopefully drinking Pepsi-Cola — at the most tasteless, uninteresting, crummy, low budget horror film I can find. Ideally, they will all stumble from the theater, go home and start petitions to revoke my Oscar for Mildred Pierce."

To which her friend must have said, "You can't possibly mean you're thinking of appearing in…"

"That's right," Ms. Crawford replied. "I'm thinking of appearing in Trog."

It's the only possible explanation.

We've written here before about Castle Films, which were those 8mm condensations of full-length movies. I collected them as a kid — they were the home video of that era — and marvelled at the way they could often abridge a 90-minute flick down to ten minutes or even four. Here we have the 8mm sound version of Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. It runs eight and a half minutes and it works pretty well at that length. Have a look…

Bill Lund was among the founders of the massive entity we now know as the Comic-Con International. He writes…

Regarding your mention of the con being too big and not concentrating solely on comics, well, I had this very discussion with several con attendees last week. From its inception, the con had always focused on comics, science fiction and films. In fact, if anyone has the earlier program books — which, sadly, I no longer have, myself — when the con was known as Golden State Comic Con or West Coast Comic Con, there were three circles in the logo that featured each subject as mentioned. Our featured guests in those earlier years, besides such luminaries from the comics world like Jack Kirby, Mike Royer, Russell Myers, Russ Manning, and Neal Adams, included Ray Bradbury, A.E. van Vogt, Forry Ackerman, Kirk Alyn, George Pal, Bob Clampett, June Foray, Edmund Hamilton, Leigh Brackett, and Frank Capra. We even had Chuck Norris demonstrating martial arts. Therefore, San Diego's convention, under whatever name it used at the time, featured various artists from each field of interest.

It was George Lucas and Charles Lipincott who had the foresight to showcase Star Wars at the con that showed the rest of Hollywood — eventually — how important the Comic Con could be to their films and tv shows.

I have all those program books and Bill's right. I don't know what the mission statement says (nor do I know anyone who ever reads mission statements) but a key concept of the San Diego Con was always that comics intersected with other media…and were perhaps in some ways legitimized by those intersections.

The other point I should make is that it isn't just that the convention caters to Hollywood and other non-comic concerns. So does almost every major news site that purports to cover the world of comics. Most were more interested in that stuff than in the programming and presences that were comic-specific. That's kind of the way the whole comic fan community has skewed the last few years. Whether we like it or not.

Rudy Giuliani recently "unveiled" (sort of) a health plan proposal (sort of) and it's really perfect, insofar as a Republican presidential candidate is concerned. Given the mood of the country these days, you kind of have to have a proposal of some sort. If you don't, you look uninterested and naïve about an issue that a majority of Americans think is important and which will probably get even more important to them as time passes. But if you want to get the hardcore Republican right behind you, to say nothing of the pharmaceutical companies and insurers, you have to make sure you come up with health care ideas that don't fix anything.

I have the feeling we're going to see a lot of these.

Matthew Yglesias tries to pinpoint the real trouble with what's going on in Iraq. Apparently, the problem isn't that things are going wrong. They are…but what's awful is that some people are pointing this out.

Here's a computer question that seems so simple that I can't believe I can't solve it or find a solution online. This applies to computers running Windows XP.

Moe, Larry and Curly each have a computer and all three computers are networked. Each uses the others' computers from time to time. Each has an account on each computer so Moe, for instance, can log into the Moe account on any of the three computers and work. What they want to do is to keep their Documents Folders in sync. Moe would like to be able to click one command on his Desktop and have all three computers automatically sync themselves up. The trouble is that no program seems to want to sync up files that are in three separate Documents and Settings folders.

There must be a simple way to handle this. What is it?

This is what's called a Soundie. Soundies were little 16mm music videos that were made, primarily in the forties, to play in the equivalent of video jukeboxes in public places. This one features Spike Jones and His City Slickers pantomiming to a record they released called "Clink Clink, Another Drink." Spike is the guy behind the bar with the fake mustache. The soloist is the great Mel Blanc. The miming isn't wonderful but who cares? It's Spike Jones and Mel Blanc. Watch it.

A number of people seem to be laboring under the impression that I'm the Complaint Department for the Comic-Con International down in San Diego. They're all wrong about that and most of them, I think, are wrong in their complaints…or at least, wrong to expect what they seem to have expected. In some cases, it's for the convention to be run largely according to their tastes with little or no attention given over to movies that don't interest them, guests they don't respect, genres for which they don't care, etc. To me, it's all Mexican Food. I may not like it but it doesn't threaten my life that it's there for others who do enjoy it.

Yes, the Comic-Con is no longer exclusively about comics. I'm not sure it ever really was. The fourth or fifth San Diego Con, back in the Paleolithic Era, I attended a very lovely talk by — and then had lunch with — Frank Capra. That was a somewhat more memorable moment in my con-going than any of those panels about how to improve comic book distribution. In fact, as I recall, a lot of those "Industry Future" panels were about how to get our medium recognized as an important one, ranked and reviewed alongside film and television. Maybe it's all one of those "be careful what you wish for" deals but comics now intermingle freely with other media…so freely that the other media feel welcome at something called a "comic book convention." Can't have one without the other.

If you'd like to attend a comic book convention that's only about comics and not about Nicholas Cage and Gwyneth Paltrow, they have them. I attended a great one just a few months ago in San Jose…the Super-Con. There are others and I think some of the complainers who wrote me would have been happier at one of them.

But I kinda think the genie's outta the bottle on San Diego. It is what it is, which is the most successful event of its kind in the world. One of my correspondents seems to think the convention operators should be holding emergency meetings, trying to figure out how to get it all back into the El Cortez Hotel and back down to a 3,000 attendance that includes Jack Kirby and Will Eisner. Ain't gonna happen.

What you can do is what I do, and I know I said this before but it bears repeating, is find your convention in that San Diego monstrosity. It may well be in there but you have to look for it. During one two-hour stretch when for some reason I didn't have a panel, I hiked down to the end of the room that housed Artist's Alley…and yes, I had to machete my way through the videogaming section to get to it. But once I was there, I happily roamed aisles that were busy but not crammed, talking with artists new and old. It was very much like San Diego Cons in days of yore. The only way it could have been more like The Old Days was if we'd all then traipsed down to Denny's for dinner, then hiked back to the hotel to sit around the pool and wonder why there were no women at our convention.

My AT&T cellphone has been dropping calls and getting bad connects for a couple weeks now…since about the time Cingular became AT&T. Based on the experiences of others down at the Comic-Con, I'd say it's not just me. It wasn't this bad before.

If you have a GMail account, you might want to check your Spam folder carefully. Their filters are declaring an awful lot of legit e-mail as Spam, at least on my accounts. Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to turn it off or adjust its sensitivity. I guess you really do get what you pay for.

See that picture of Jack Benny above? Well, it's not Jack Benny. It's my pal, Eddie Carroll, a man of many talents. Eddie is a writer. He used to write for Hanna-Barbera, often working with a partner named Jamie Farr. Yes, that Jamie Farr.

Eddie also does voices for cartoons. Most notably, he took over the role of Jiminy Cricket for Disney after the original Jiminy, "Ukulele" Ike Edwards, croaked.

And Eddie plays Jack Benny. He tours now and then in a wonderful one-man show that really is like spending an hour or two with The Man. It's not just that he manages to look like Benny and sound like Benny and even play the violin like Benny. That would all be impressive enough but Eddie manages to replicate the superb Benny timing. That's the hard part and he's got it down, as you'll see if you go see him perform. Where can you do this? Check out this page on Eddie's website to see if he's going to be in your neck of the woods soon.

Since he probably isn't, you'll have to settle for this. Tomorrow (Wednesday), Eddie will be the guest on Stu's Show, which is heard on Shokus Internet Radio, a station you can hear on your computer for free if you'll only log in via this page. This is not a podcast which you can download or listen to whenever you like. This is a radio broadcast over the Internet and Stu's Show airs live from 4 PM to 6 PM West Coast Time. The broadcasts then repeat for a week in the same time slot.

We recommend the channel any hour of the day. Tune in right now if you like and see what they have on. But we especially recommend it tomorrow when Eddie Carroll is on. I'm going to try to call in and ask a pithy, incisive question. Let's see if I can come up with one.

Here are some clips of Tom Snyder's stint on the Tomorrow program. I'm sorry it doesn't include the night that Snyder was interviewing the singer Meat Loaf and for some reason, kept calling him "Meatball."