For reasons that escape me, I'm booked for a batch of comic-type conventions in the next few months…

• June 2 and 3, I'll be at the Super-Con, which used to be in Oakland, California but is now in San Jose. They have a pretty good lineup of guests so we may have some interesting panels and program items. I'll tell you all about them when things get firmed up.
• July 5 through 8, the lovely Carolyn Kelly and the lovely I (to say nothing of the lovely Rob Paulsen) will be Guests of Honor at Anthrocon, which is an annual convention in Pittsburgh to celebrate funny animals and the anthropomorphic arts. Again, there will be panels and talks. I'll talk about the silly cartoons I write. Carolyn will talk about the work of her father, Walt Kelly, on Pogo…which was only, like, the best newspaper strip ever. And I imagine Rob will talk about doing some of the best cartoon voice work done today.
• And then of course, July 26-29, we and everyone who could get a hotel room will be at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. Usually, I go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. This year, they've made me a Guest of Honor so I guess I'm going to go there and run twelve or thirteen panels. It's way too early to say what they might be but they'd better be good. If they aren't, there's a good chance no one will show up for the convention.

If you can make it to any of these, please come by and say howdy. I get a lot of e-mail here but I somehow don't believe people are reading this website until they tell me in person.

Also, if you see me, look around. You may just spot John Lithgow lurking close by. (As a couple of you have written to me, it could be worse. I could be stalked by Robert Blake.)

One of my big peeves, apart from John Lithgow following me around, is that so many people who purport to care about comic book history don't seem to know how to spell the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman. These are important men with not-difficult names but just take a moment and Google some aberrant spellings. You'll find countless hits for Siegal and Shuster, Seigel and Schuster, Seigle and Shusster, etc. Sometimes, they get one wrong, sometimes both. This probably bugs me more than it should.

Well, here's a bit of comic book history. Above left is an ad that appeared in New Comics #11, which came out in 1936 from the company we now know as DC Comics. It's a promo for a new book the company was then launching called Detective Comics. That's the cover of #1, which was drawn by Vince Sullivan, the book's associate editor. The ad touts the folks who created the interior of that historic publication — Tom Hickey, Sven Elven, Bill Patrick, Creig Flessel (who recently celebrated his 94th birthday), Seigel & Shuster [sic], Homer Fleming and Alger. Not listed is Fred Schwab, who also did a story in that first issue.

That's right. In what may be the first ad to ever mention Jerry and Joe, Jerry's name was misspelled. So maybe it's a time-honored tradition.

As some of you may recall, I've had some concern about the size of the crows in my neighborhood lately. They're now about the size of Lincoln Continentals.

But I have something new to worry about. I think I'm being stalked. What's more, I think I'm being stalked by John Lithgow.

Today, I went into a Bristol Farms market and as I was waiting to check out, I noticed that the man standing behind me in line was John Lithgow. This is the third time in thirty days I've encountered Mr. Lithgow. The first, which I didn't tell you about, was in a restaurant almost a month ago. He acted like he was there to eat with someone else but I wasn't fooled. He was there to keep an eye on me.

The second time was at the Billy Connelly performance mentioned here. Again, Lithgow feigned like he was there for some innocent reason like seeing the show…and he had me almost convinced. He's that good an actor. I was prepared to just consider the two run-ins a coincidence.

But today at Bristol Farms, I caught on. There he was with his little basket, pretending to be out grocery shopping, supposedly more interested in his purchases than he was in me. Nice try, Lithgow, but I'm on to you. I don't know what you're up to but it won't work.

Stay tuned to this weblog for more sightings of John Lithgow. And don't think there won't be plenty.

Ezra Klein debunks the myth that Americans have better health care than Canada, France, Great Britain and Germany. When people say otherwise, I'm never quite sure if it's just the old "we're the best at everything" reflex kicking in or if they actually believe this.

Regis Philbin returns on Thursday to Live With Regis and Kelly following his bypass operation. One of his guests that morning will be David Letterman.

Earlier this morning, GSN ran two episodes of To Tell the Truth in tribute to its longtime panelist, Kitty Carlisle. One was an episode I described here…from memory since I don't think I've seen it since it first aired back in the seventies. Just for the record, I remembered what happened but I remembered them in reverse. The "reveal" of Ms. Carlisle's son preceded the unmasking of Joe Garagiola's son. Either way, it was still a funny segment.

Good night, Internet. I'll see you in the morning.

The career of Bob Fosse. In a little over three minutes.

And after you bail on the Rich Little video, go watch something clever. This is a link to Robert Smigel's cartoon on last night's Saturday Night Live, "Torboto."

I've embedded too many videos today so I won't put this one up here. But here's a link to a YouTube video of Rich Little's appearance at the White House Correspondent's Dinner. It runs about twenty minutes.

Slightly off-topic: I noticed that one weblog (this one) that picked up a link from me on this described me as "a Leno apologist who obviously doesn't care for some aspects of Letterman's comedy." I think "apologist" is the wrong word there but just for the record, I like both Dave and Jay…though I watch them with generous fast-forwarding because I don't think either guy has been at his best for quite a while. And speaking of not being at your best for a long time, go watch Rich Little.

Courtesy of the Trader Joe's market chain, here's a simple PDF file on how to read the Nutrition Facts box on any food product you might pick up.

Speedy Gonzales, the fastest mouse in all of Mexico, is making a comeback. He's still an enormously popular character, especially considering that no one ever liked his cartoons. Thanks to Joel O'Brien for the tip.

I usually try to not put up more than two of these a day but this is the CNN interview from last week with Joe Simon. Joe is one of my favorite human beings and it's great to see him getting attention and still sharp and working at age 93. This only runs a minute and forty-five seconds but it'll give you a brief intro to one of the true living legends of comics…

I've written here in the past about Jim Thurman, especially about his partnership with a gent named Gene Moss. For several years in the sixties, they were top comedy writers in Hollywood and occasional performers. Most notably, they wrote and did voices for the popular cartoon series, Roger Ramjet, and starred in an extremely hip, adult kids' show called Shrimpenstein that ran on KHJ Channel 9 here in Los Angeles for too short a time. You can read more about them in this piece I posted when Mr. Moss passed away.

Alas, this is the piece about Jim Thurman dying. After he and Moss split up, he went on to become one of the main writers of Sesame Street, for which he won many an Emmy. He had a wonderful and wicked sense of humor and the few times we spoke on the phone, it was in full flower. Sorry to hear about his passing. Here are a few more details, courtesy of Variety.

If you have occasion to use public wi-fi connections, this article may be of interest to you. So may this article (and video) from the same source about what you can do to minimize problems like those described in the first article.

Okay, I've watched last night's White House Correspondents Dinner and am officially appalled. There's always something a bit "wrong" to me about reporters and the folks they cover intermingling this way; not that they shouldn't be civil to one another but the unbridled shmoozing makes you wonder about the sincerity of both sides.

Entertainer Rich Little had a rough time of it, especially since his "opening act" was George W. Bush announcing that in light of the tragedy at Virginia Tech, there would be no presidential attempts at humor that evening. I'm not sure I entirely follow the logic of that. Yes, it's awful and sad that 32 young people were killed and scores more were injured there. Would the president have gone out and yukked it up if that hadn't happened because, after all, the recent deaths of dozens of U.S. soldiers and hundreds of Iraqis shouldn't get in the way of a good monologue? Nevertheless, it got Little off to a bumpy start. (When Lewis Black did a similar dinner a few years ago, he had to follow Dick Cheney talking about the death of the Pope. Hey, there's a topic that will always get an audience in the mood to laugh.) It's also an awkward spot when you're brought in to perform with the clear expectation that you'll offend no one on the dais or in the front row.

Still, it could have gone a lot better. Once upon a time, Rich Little was an impressionist of uncanny talent. He did people that no one else had ever done before and when he did the ones everyone else did, he did them better than just about anyone. The impersonations though often carried rather weak or hoary material…and now the jokes are no better but the impressions aren't as impressive. The late Stanley Ralph Ross, who wrote for Little, used to tell people who said the replicas were uneven, "Rich is on target about 50% of the time but no one can tell him about the half that isn't." That was easy to believe last night…though I'm not sure Little wasn't "righter" for the event than some of those they've had in recent years. I have the feeling that after last night's dinner, the person in charge of booking the talent got a lot more compliments than the person who booked Stephen Colbert.

It was kind of an amazing performance. For his Johnny Carson bit, Little used a very old joke that you heard in high school or before. It was the one about the guy who takes an apparent drunk home — a drunk who can't even walk — and then the wife says, "Thanks for bringing him home but where's his wheelchair?" It's not a bad joke but of course, it has nothing to do with Johnny Carson and left me wondering why Rich Little, who's been replicating Carson for more than a quarter-century, doesn't have material tailored for that impression. Next week, he could do that joke for his George Burns impression or his Jack Benny.

Oh, well. I suspect Mr. Little — who no longer plays his home town of Vegas very often — has earned himself a year or two of bookings from Republican-leaning organizations and auditoriums in more Conservative communities. He'll do the same impressions and in between, he'll talk about the honor of performing for The President and crowds will love him for it. You or I may not have thought he was funny last night but it was probably a great career booster.

One final thing which I must admit baffled me was a video — and here, I'll embed it and you can see if it baffles you, too. It's a David Letterman Top Ten List introduced by, of all people, Presidential Press Secretary Tony Snow. If someone got up in a major public forum and said that Bush was a stumbling idiot who had convinced a large part of America that he didn't know what he was doing, it would be Mr. Snow's job, if not his duty as a supporter, to rebut and denounce that view of his boss. Yet here he is, presenting a video to that effect, endorsing the importance of Dave Letterman, a celebrity who makes it quite clear on a nightly basis that he thinks Bush is a dangerous boob. The video includes no disclaimer. Dave does not say, "It's all in fun" or even "In spite of his gaffes, he's still my president." There are no such niceties…and one even senses a certain air of contempt in the fact that Letterman says so little, as if the clips speak for themselves.

So, uh, why is Tony Snow affording so much dignity to this video? Shouldn't his official position be that Letterman is all wrong about George W. Bush?