You might want to take a look at this extensive Washington Post poll about what the people of this nation (or at least the ones polled) think about Bush and Congress and the war and all the major issues that concern most people and don't involve American Idol. The numbers aren't so good for Bush or Congress, but it's the Congressional numbers that have me a bit puzzled. I think there's a key question that isn't being asked here.

If someone says that they disapprove of the way Democrats in Congress are doing their job with regard to Iraq, what does that mean? Does it mean they think the Democrats have been too aggressive in stopping the war or not aggressive enough? That's a big difference and it's the most important issue facing Congress (and maybe the country) today. But for some reason, those who feel the Democrats in Congress should do more in this regard are being lumped in with those who feel they should do less. I'm guessing, based on the other answers, that most of the disapproval is because they aren't doing more…but that's just a guess. It would be nice if the pollsters broke it down for us.

Last Friday, I was a guest on the Time Travel radio show. Today, you can download an MP3 file of it (it's inside a ZIP file for some reason) from this page. Beware if you go there to get it. The site plays creepy music.

This runs two and a half minutes and may be of interest only to folks who live in or around Los Angeles.

One of the last surviving "chains" of the old style coffee shop is Du-Par's. There are three of them left, down from a one-time peak of, I believe, eight or so around the Southland. The original one was in the famed Farmers Market at Third and Fairfax in L.A., and that one's still there, having recently reopened after a two year closure for remodelling. From the outside, it doesn't look all that different. (An observation: You can sometimes spot a long time Angeleno when they refer to the place as "Du-Par's Farmhouse." But it hasn't had that name since the early sixties.)

We used to say that at a Du-Par's, you could get excellent breakfasts, okay lunches, pretty awful dinners and, for dessert, some of the best pies in town. The pies were — and I guess still are — baked right on the premises. I have to guess here because even though I live within walking distance of one, I haven't been to a Du-Par's in years; not since the chain was taken over by new owners. Interestingly, the new proprietors are of the family that used to operate two other great L.A. coffee shop chains — Tiny Naylor's and Biff's. I'll have to get to a Du-Par's soon and report back on if the breakfasts are still great and the dinners are still poor.

Someone — I have no idea who — put together this little montage of stills from Du-Par's history. I believe most of the images are from the Farmers Market location. It's our thing for you to click on for today.

We said back here that the Critierion company would soon be announcing a DVD release of the Billy Wilder film, Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival). Well, it's been announced. No release date yet but we're hearing June or July.

A week after the death of Johnny Hart — who wrote and drew B.C. and wrote The Wizard of Id — we have word of the death of Brant Parker, who drew the latter. Parker was 86 and had been ailing for several years. He stopped drawing The Wizard of Id completely in 1997 but the strip had featured much work by assistants — mainly his son Jeff — for years before that. Jeff is expected to carry it on. Brant was also involved for a time with the newspaper strips, Crock, Goosemeyer and Out of Bounds.

I'm afraid I know very little about Mr. Parker beyond what you can get from obits like this one. But everything I said about Johnny Hart being funny applied to The Wizard of Id, a strip that was very popular in this country and wildly so in Australia. I used to have a friend down there who'd send me the reprint books that they put out in that country — huge, wonderful volumes that caused you to laugh out loud every page or two. I wish we had collections like that of the strip here.

Here's a message from Don Porges…

On your 2:21 pm posting: you're painting with a terribly broad brush, and it follows jarringly on the heels of the Colbert posting, in particular this of Colbert's: "Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us."

I think you're expressing a cynicism (that isn't typical of you, from what else I've read) that all political debate is just opportunism, and that it is inappropriate to take the bloodiest school shooting in history and use it to talk about those elements of gun policy that someone sincerely believes contributed to it. I disagree, presuming that we're talking about people arguing in good faith. I can certainly understand you not wanting to invite a swarm of gun control emails, and perhaps your sarcastic both-sides-be-damned approach seemed like a way of avoiding that.

Nevertheless, "referring" to both sides at once, by abstracting away any actual position and turning to phrases like "whatever you believe," comes across as spitting on the concept of having a position, or believing that it matters. You also seem to show contempt for the idea that one side might actually be right, even though both sides continue to behave in the "same" manner by persisting in arguing for their side.

The point of the discussion that I'm sure is playing out on blogs and on TV is not to "honor the memory" of those who died. Their survivors will not be spending the next several days hitting refresh on their RSS readers to follow the discussion, or watching cable news. If I strongly believe that implementing my position would save 32 more lives in another event, the time to argue for it is now, not later, and I think that can be done without disrespecting the dead.

Finally, that bit about "you may even be glad all those people were shot": that's another thing that's worse, not better, from naming no names, or sides of the issue. Maybe you've been watching cable news all day, and someone you've seen deserves it, but from out here, it's just a terrible accusation looking for a target.

I think you're reading a lot into my remarks that I didn't say and don't believe, starting with any criticism of having a position or believing that it matters. Obviously, the deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history matters. How could anyone think it didn't matter? Having a position therefore matters.

You disagree with me "presuming that we're talking about people arguing in good faith." There's the problem right there. The kind of thing I was talking about — pouncing on the issue to further one's view of gun control, particularly under the guise of honoring the dead — does not strike me as arguing in good faith. It strikes me as opportunism…exploiting the tragedy while it's hot, while people can still be manipulated by their emotions. If there is a reasoned argument to be made here, it will be valid when there aren't fresh bodies to use as selling points. And the time to make it is all the time…because this problem will always be with us until we do something about it. Which is not going to happen.

I wasn't really saying anything beyond that but since you've got me going here, I will: I don't think the solution is anywhere in all the Internet postings I read this afternoon in the immediate aftermath of the shootings. They all fell into the predictable, extreme positions of "we need less guns" versus "we need more guns." As long as the debate ping-pongs between those positions and those people control the issue, nothing will change.

I don't believe that in every issue, both sides are always wrong. Often, one side is right. In the quite-serious matter of the Iraq War, one side sure seems to me to be right and getting righter. But in this particular matter — the ongoing, constant issue of guns in America — I think neither side is right; not in the sense of doing anything to lessen the chance of more incidents like today's. They've effectively paralyzed this issue to the point where each new bloody massacre is an occasion for a lot of yelling and posturing and donation-collecting, much of it justified in the memory of the victims…but no meaningful changes.

Those would have to come from the middle…but the middle doesn't have a voice in this discussion. It never has, and as each mass murder further empowers the extremes, the chance of that voice ever being heard goes increasingly from slim towards none. Whenever the next "deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history" occurs, it will occur under the exact same set of gun laws we have today.

I know that sounds like cynicism. If you'd like to convince me it's not realistic, then tell me what changed after the last "deadliest shooting spree in our nation's history." Or the one before.

This runs a little under three minutes and it asks the musical question, "How many times can a politician avoid answering the same question?"

The politician is Michael Howard, who at the time of this interrogation was the Home Secretary in Great Britain. There was a controversy in 1997 when a report was about to come out about prison conditions and in particular, a series of escapes. Derek Lewis, who was in charge of the prison system, said that Howard had threatened to overrule him on a controversial decision. This would have been quite improper.

In the following clip, newsman Jeremy Paxman keeps repeating a question that Howard pretends to answer and doesn't. I wish more American journalists would do this but I'm afraid that if they did, no one who needs to be interviewed would ever consent to it. Paxman doesn't get an answer but apparently the interview so embarrassed Howard and created pressure on him that a few days later, he issued a statement denying that he'd issued the threat. He claimed he hadn't answered it on Paxman's show because he didn't recall and needed to check his records.

In any case, you probably won't care about the issue at hand but you might recognize the techniques of Answer Avoidance…

Fred Kaplan explains John McCain's stance on the Iraq War. It pretty much comes down to backing the George W. Bush plan in order to get the Republican nomination and then — in the unlikely event that he does — retreating from that position so that he has a shot at winning the election. I can't think of any politician who's ever disappointed me more.

At least 31 people are dead and many more have been wounded on a Virginia college campus when a guy with a gun went on a shooting spree.

I think we can best honor the memory of the victims by using the tragedy to lobby hard for our particular views on Gun Control. Whatever you believe, just insist that this proves you're right. Hey, if you can use it to swing a little public sentiment in your direction, you may even be glad all those people were shot.

I mentioned recently here that my one-time love of Woody Woodpecker cartoons flowed from the drawing lessons that the character's "boss," Walter Lantz, used to give on his cartoon show. Let me expand on that and mention a book that I suspect figured big into the lives of many folks my age who got into animation or drawing. Around 1958 (though possibly before), the Whitman Publishing Company brought out Walter Lantz Easy Way to Draw, a "how to" cartooning book written clearly and properly for a young audience.

I doubt Mr. Lantz (seen above in the photo at left) had much to do with its contents. The book is credited to Frank McSavage and Norm McGary, two artists who worked a lot for Western Printing and Lithography, publishers of Whitman books and tons of coloring books, games and puzzle books featuring Woody and the rest of the Lantz menagerie. Western also created and printed the Lantz-licensed comic books published at the time by Dell…and this was such a lucrative relationship for Lantz that he seems to have surrendered a lot of control of his properties to Western. The designs of his characters were constantly changing on screen and when Western standardized them for their books and magazines, Lantz recognized that those artists (McSavage, especially) knew what they were doing and adjusted his films and the other merchandise to match. He also employed McSavage and McGary directly from time to time.

Easy Way to Draw is a great book and my copy, which I must have gotten soon after it came out, moved me to sit for hours and attempt to replicate the drawings it featured. There was a concise, understandable explanation of the principles of animation along with step-by-step diagrams on how to draw Woody and his pals. Lantz had all these characters like Homer Pigeon that I didn't really know that well…and as an avid reader of Walter Lantz comic books and watcher of Walter Lantz TV shows, if I didn't know them, no one did. But I learned to draw them about as well as a kid my age could have learned to draw them and I'm sure it made me like them more. One day in school — I don't remember exactly why — I did a big drawing of Homer Pigeon on the blackboard. All of the kids in class were impressed, even though none of them knew who it was, either. Alas, these skills had limited value. When I got a little older, I learned you couldn't attract girls by showing them how you could draw Wally Walrus.

I'd wager big that I'm not the only person in my age bracket who was encouraged in a career towards drawing and/or animation by this book. It appears to have been kept in print for some time even if that meant dropping chapters and slapping a more "modern" cover on it, which they did. Still, you don't see a lot of copies around because it encouraged its owners to draw right in the book or cut out certain pages. So either you loved the book enough to despoil your copy or you loved it enough to keep it in pristine condition and never want to part with it. I'm in the latter category. I wonder if anyone's done a "how to draw cartoons" DVD or computer program that is now having the same impact on the nine-year-old Future Cartoonists of America.

Over on Salon — where you may have to watch a brief ad to get in — Glenn Greenwald has a weblog post that I suspect rolls out a new set of "talking points" against the Iraq War. It's that the war is becoming overwhelmingly unpopular among Americans (that part's true) and that the folks lobbying for The Surge and "staying the course" are really only interested in keeping it going over there so they don't have to admit how much of a disaster their plan has been. I think Greenwald's focusing too much on the pundits supporting the war and not enough on the guy in the Oval Office who actually keeps us there (i.e., The Decider). But I think there's something to the view that it's more about not being wrong than it's ever been about being right.

Here's one of my favorite commercials from the sixties. The gent behind the counter is the wonderful comic actor, Jack Gilford.

Retired General John J. Sheehan explains why he joined the long list of military men who've declined the post of serving as Bush's War Czar. It is perhaps worth keeping in mind that this is not someone who can be dismissed as a know-nothing, washed-up, left-wing looney. This is a guy that the White House thought knew enough about the military to be in charge of overseeing it near the highest levels. And he thinks the Bush administration is going about things all wrong.

And obviously, one of the guys who went to University High School in the seventies who could have starred in Dumb and Dumber was me. In the previous posting, I confused Jeff Daniels (who was in that movie) with Jeff Bridges (who wasn't).

Thanks to all of you who wrote in to point out my error. All nine thousand of you.

Actually, these are eBay auctions that have already closed but I didn't bid and you wouldn't have, either. Someone was selling yearbooks from my era at Emerson Junior High School and University High here in Los Angeles. Here's part of the listing for the 1964 Emerson yearbook…

I am selling a 1964 Emerson Junior High of Los Angeles, California Yearbook featuring singer Bonnie Raitt, Singer and actor David Cassidy, Director and writer, John Landis, Jayne-Marie Mansfield, daughter of Jayne Mansfield and Mark Evanier, tv writer. See them when they were in Junior High School!

You learn the darnedest things on eBay. I never knew I went to junior high school with Jayne Mansfield's daughter. (I did know about the others. Bonnie Raitt once expressed amazement that I knew who her father was. By the way, the first time I read the above, I thought it was saying that I was the father of Jayne Mansfield's kid.) Here's part of the listing for the 1967 Uni Hi yearbook…

I am selling a 1967 University High School Yearbook from Los Angeles, California. It features the cool actor Jeff Bridges on three pages (two pictoral and one printed name) as shown on the photograph of the index page. He is in two pictures from the high school play, Romanoff and Juliet, he has one school portrait photo and there is a mention of his name on the student council page.

And I never knew Jeff Bridges went to my high school. What's more, I recall seeing that play and also a few unpleasant arguments in the student council meetings. I don't remember Bridges specifically but I knew a lot of guys at Uni who could have starred in Dumb and Dumber. As well as a few teachers.