I have a mess of negatives and slides I want to turn into JPG files. Flying back from Pittsburgh recently, I was flipping through the SkyMall catalog and I saw this thing advertised. It's a Digital Picture Converter from Hammacher Schlemmer. I thought I'd ask if anyone reading this has ever tried one of these…or anything else they thought worked well. I don't need editing software. I just need to turn slides and negatives into digital images. Any recommendations?

Here's the world's best ventriloquist, Paul Winchell, selling new Blue Cheer detergent with the help of his mahogany friend, Jerry Mahoney.

There's always been something so comforting for me about watching Paul Winchell. He was my first favorite TV star and I suppose that's reason enough to be fond of the guy. But what he did, he did so well. The actual man, who I got to know (and even direct) late in his life always made me a little nervous, partly because he was…well, let's just say "troubled." But also, he was Paul Winchell, my childhood fave. You don't want anything to spoil that.

I wouldn't expect anyone else to get the warm fuzzies watching a detergent commercial. But like I said, there's always been something so comforting to me about watching the man work. He was just so good…

I've updated the list of panels I'm doing at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. A few names have been added and a few have been deleted. Here's where you want to be next week and when.

I promised to start recommending books about comics, did it once and then forgot about it. Sorry. Today, I'm going to suggest that if you're at all interested in the history of comics, you pick up a copy of Brush Strokes With Greatness: The Life and Art of Joe Sinnott, a book all about the man some call the best inker in the comic book industry.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll mention that Joe is an old and dear friend, and that I wrote the Afterword in this book. (Some guy named Stan Lee wrote the foreword.)

For those of you who don't follow comics: Most comic art is created by someone sketching the thing out in pencil and then someone going in with a brush and/or pen and inscribing the precise lines in ink. Often, one person does both stages but sometimes, the work is divided. Some artists prefer to do one or the other…or are good or fast at one and not the other. In many cases, publishers have encouraged the assembly line procedure so that the better artists can produce more pages. There was a time when most inkers were guys who weren't qualified to do the pencil art and their limitations caused them to bring down the quality of the pages they finished.

That was more common in what we might call the pre-Sinnott era. Joe was and is a very fine artist, and he showed everyone what an inker could be. When he inked a bad artist, the work came out better and when he inked a good one, it also came out better. He's also one of the three or four nicest people I've met in comics…and I think some of you know how many people I've met in comics. So that's not faint praise. This book, compiled and written expertly by Tim Lasiuta, tells the story of Joe's life and showcases his artwork, plus it's filled with testimonials from those who've worked with him and/or admired his skills. How can you not order a copy?

Hey, I don't think I posted a link to order this. One of our "recommendations" that a lot of you took and thanked us for was back when we suggested you catch an old Billy Wilder film called, depending on which print of it you were seeing, either Ace in the Hole or The Big Carnival. For a long time, it was hard to catch and when it turned up on Turner Classic Movies, a lot of you got to see it for the first time. And liked it, if my e-mail is to be believed. It really is a timely story, given the trends of the news media.

It just came out on a Criterion DVD. I don't have my copy yet but I've never known the Criterion folks not to serve a movie well…so here's a link to get one. I just ordered mine. And here's an article by Jack Shafer about the film's history and regrettable relevance.

I never met Shirley Slesinger Lasswell but I followed her legal battle with Disney closely. I'm not entirely sure who was right in this matter but I admire the courage and tenacity to take on The Mouse and his battery of attorneys. I also have a certain fondness for her late hubby, Fred Lasswell, who gave us the Snuffy Smith comic strip for several centuries. "Uncle Fred" was that rarest of creatures — a cartoonist who was as colorful and unreal as the characters he drew. So I figure his wife had to be a great lady. You can read all about Shirley here.

Around 1972, Albert Brooks made a short film called "The Famous School for Comedians" for — I'm doing this from memory so I may be wrong — a PBS program called The Great American Dream Machine. It was based on an article of the same name that he'd done for Esquire, all about a supposed place of higher learning for folks who wanted to become comics. Reportedly, Brooks was amazed at how many people read the article or saw the film and then asked in all seriousness, how they could go about enrolling. I suppose if you didn't realize it was a joke you didn't have much of a future in the fast-paced world of Professional Comedy.

As far as I know, the film is currently unavailable. But around 1974, Milton Berle hosted a couple of pilots for a proposed talk show in which he'd sit around with various comedians, new and old, discussing the art and science of making audiences laugh. The series never went anywhere but one of the pilots featured Albert Brooks as a guest…and it really was quite amazing. Brooks topped Uncle Miltie at every turn and you could tell that though Berle tried to be a good sport about it, he was not pleased with the way the interview went. (The two pilots were released many years ago as a VHS tape and Laserdisc called Milton Berle's Mad World of Comedy. I don't think there's ever been a DVD release…and I'll warn you if you want to hunt it down, apart from the Brooks/Berle dust-up, it was a pretty tedious show.)

Anyway, they ran two minutes of Brooks's "Famous School for Comedians" film on that show — sweetened with phony laughter, which kind of adds an extra layer to the whole joke. Someone put that two minutes up on YouTube and now I'll shut up and let you watch it…

Just got off the phone with Joe Simon, the great comic book creator who'll turn 94 years of age in a few months. He said something so wonderful that I'm putting it up here to share with you and so I don't forget it.

We were talking about how he's going to be 94 and I told him that's nothing; that the legendary caricaturist Al Hirschfeld was still running around and drawing and creating when he was 99. The conversation then went exactly like this…

JOE: Al Hirschfeld was one of my heroes. I got very mad at him when he died.

ME: You were mad at him for dying? So did you admire his art or his age or…?

JOE: I admired the fact that even in his nineties, he sued his agent.

Isn't that lovely? Also, I spoke yesterday with Joe Sinnott, who's a much younger man. He's 81. Some of you may recall that Joe had some severe medical problems and was hospitalized. Well, he's home and he sounds like he always did, which is a lot more energetic than me. Later today if I get a moment, I'll post a plug/review of a new book about this Joe but don't wait for that. Go ahead and order a copy.

The weather forecast for Comic-Con International looks like one of those "let's move to San Diego" periods: Mostly sunny with highs around 73, lows around 67. Like Lewis Black says, the easiest job in the world is being the weathercaster in San Diego. You just say, "The weather's going to be nice. Back to you."

Your best source of tips on how to navigate the monster that is the con is Tom Spurgeon's invaluable resource. It makes my measly list of suggestions seem measly.

I have to make a few changes in the list of who's going to be on some of the panels I'm moderating but I haven't updated the list yet. Most of it is correct…

Here, slightly but unavoidably delayed, is the clip from Mr. Terrific, the "other" sitcom about a nerdy superhero. The same night Captain Nice debuted on NBC, Mr. Terrific first flew onto CBS, a half hour earlier. Actually, as you'll see, this is two clips. The first is the Mr. Terrific opening with a nice bit of narration by the ubiquitous (in the sixties) Paul Frees. Then the second part gives us a few minutes from one episode that pretty much captures what was wrong with the series. It wasn't that funny.

I know little of Stephen Strimpell, who had the title role. He apparently was more of a stage than screen actor and he was at one point quite prominent in New York theater as both a performer and teacher. He also was one of those people — there sometimes seem to be a lot of them — who go to law school, pass the bar…and then go do something else. One wonders if at any time when they had him dangling from wires in a baggy superhero suit, he paused to think, "Well, I guess this is one way to uphold the law." Ten bucks says that the casting calls for this show said they were looking for a "Woody Allen type" and Strimpell was as close as they could come.

The rest of the cast included Dick Gautier, a fine gentleman who tells me he reads this weblog. You probably know he played Hymie the Robot on Get Smart and Elvis Conrad Birdie in the original stage version of Bye Bye Birdie and Robin Hood on When Things Were Rotten and hundreds of other roles. Did you know he's also a cartoonist? Check out his website and see some examples. And also in the cast, you have John McGiver, who was on every sixties sitcom at one time or another to play a frustrated authority figure, and who starred in a fun but forgotten sitcom I liked called Many Happy Returns. Playing his aide was Paul Smith, who may have set some sort of record for doing bit parts on TV shows without anyone ever knowing his name.

I recall getting bored with Mr. Terrific after an episode or two but I watched Captain Nice up until its also-quick demise. Someone did an article soon after in TV Guide saying that the two shows had cancelled each other out; that the lesson television should learn is not to do two shows at the same time with the same premise because neither would succeed. Of course, only a few years earlier, we got The Munsters and The Addams Family in the same season and they both did okay. I don't think either of the superhero sitcoms was that wonderful and in neither case did you have particularly endearing characters. William Daniels, who played Cap'n Nice, is still one of the great actors out there but he's cold and — as his John Adams was described in 1776 — "obnoxious and disliked."

Here's Mr. Terrific in its fleeting glory…

People who attended the screening of Skidoo in Hollywood last evening are e-mailing me to say, "It wasn't as bad as you made it out to be" or "It was worse." You folks will have to mud-wrestle to settle this. Me, I think the film transcends ordinary adjectives about quality. Here's another view of it.

Just found this. David Corn rebuts that William Kristol op-ed about how George W. Bush will go down in history as a great and successful president. I think editors who publish pundits like Kristol, or TV producers who invite them on the air, ought to be asked the following question: Would you entrust your body and your family's health to a doctor whose every diagnosis turned out to be as wrong as the predictions of some of the political commentators you think we ought to hear from?

Since I've been swamped with work all day and been too busy to post, I now get to do back-to-back links to Fred Kaplan. In this article, he says we're about to see more attempts to read our mail, listen in on our phone conversations, etc. and — this is the troubling part — doing so without accountability or adherence to the law. Lovely.

In the meantime, I can't help but join the chorus of blogs linking to this article. Here's the first paragraph…

BAGHDAD — In March, he was declared captured. In May, he was declared killed, and his purported corpse was displayed on state-run TV. But Wednesday, Omar al-Baghdadi, the supposed leader of an al-Qaida-affiliated group in Iraq, was declared nonexistent by U.S. military officials, who say he is a fictional character created to give an Iraqi face to a foreign-run terror group.

Tune in tomorrow when Omar al-Baghdadi unmasks and is revealed to be Andy Kaufman.

Fred Kaplan summarizes the new National Intelligence Estimate. If it's right, we're in for more terrorist attacks. Isn't it comforting to know that either that's true or the entire U.S. intelligence community doesn't know what they're talking about?

From that long, long list of TV shows that came and went quickly but which should have stuck around for a while, we bring you Captain Nice, created by Buck Henry, no doubt capitalizing on the "heat" he had in the business due to the success of Get Smart. The title role was played by William Daniels and the series debuted on NBC on January 9, 1967 — the very same night that another super-hero parody sitcom, Mr. Terrific, debuted on CBS. Both were pretty clever shows, though I liked Captain Nice better. (If all goes well, we'll be featuring Mr. Terrific tomorrow in this space.)

Captain Nice went off in May of 1967 and the fifteen episodes were barely rerun thereafter. I have a 93rd generation VHS tape of a few episodes and they hold up pretty well. The series also starred Ann Prentiss (Paula's sister), Byron Foulger and the wondrous Alice Ghostley. A few years ago, I directed Alice on a cartoon series and she looked exactly the same as she did in '67 and she was even funnier.

This is the first four minutes of what I believe was the first episode of Captain Nice, including the opening titles. I don't know this for a fact but I have the feeling that this gag was shot as a quickie pilot/demo and that the network bought the series from it. (NBC bought Get Smart off one scene — the one of Maxwell Smart and The Chief trying to discuss a mission inside The Cone of Silence.) Perhaps I'm wrong about this. I may also be wrong but I think that's Buck Henry doing the narration and I'm pretty sure that in the theme song, one can hear our old friend Dick Beals doing the kid's voice. Have a look and then come back here tomorrow for Mr. Terrific. Thanks to Stan Tychinski for the suggestion.