Just to remind you all: Turner Classic Movies is running the oft-discussed (on this website) and ultra-cynical Billy Wilder movie, Ace in the Hole this Saturday. I think it's on at Noon on the West Coast but you'd better look it up to make certain. It may be listed by its other name, The Big Carnival.

As you may recall, we made a fuss over this film in part because it's never had a real home video release in the United States. Several folks have now informed me though that a DVD is coming this summer from the folks at Criterion. So if you don't remember to set your TiVo, it may not matter.

Rolling Stone convenes a panel of Iraq War pessimists to discuss how bad things are there and how much worse they can get. I almost didn't link to this because it seemed too negative and gloomy…but I do think even the optimists need to brace themselves for the possibility of some "worst case" scenarios. This piece will give you several.

The last big building that comprised the Stardust Hotel in Las Vegas was imploded very early this morning and I thought you might enjoy seeing that. Originally, the company behind it all told reporters that they weren't going to make a fuss; that they even preferred for safety reasons to not draw a huge audience for the event. Obviously, they changed their mind because they put on a huge fireworks show before making the shell of the hotel go bye-bye. It doesn't look like their fireworks display was as spectacular as the one I saw when the Hacienda Hotel was blown up but it looks pretty good.

It's charming in a way that they added the fireworks. I mean, why? It's not like you need that to attract interest when you're blowing up a building. And for what purpose? They don't have to drum up business for the Stardust, after all, and I fail to see how this will translate into any value to the new mega-resort they'll be opening on that parcel of land in a few years. They just did it to show off, which I think is great. It's Vegas, baby.

We have team coverage for you of the demolition. First, here's footage from a British newscast…

Then since that clip ends a little abruptly, here's the CBS News footage of the implosion…

I'm not going to miss the Stardust for reasons I explained here. Or at least, I thought I wasn't going to miss it. I kinda wish I'd gotten there one last time before they made it go away, not because it was a great hotel. It hadn't been that for decades. But it was fun to look at the coffee shop and imagine Frank and Dean and Peter Lawford sitting there, talking about stuff.

A message from the family of Richard Jeni.

My man, Fred Kaplan, on George W. Bush's obsession with other nations saying "thank you" to the United States.

This post is mainly for folks who live in Los Angeles but the rest of you can listen in.

One of the things I've learned to never discuss with friends is pizza. I have friends who wouldn't react if you told them their mother was a crack whore but if you disparaged their favorite pizza, it would be pistols at twenty paces. Actually, the possessive quality of one's pizza fave often goes in two stages, the first being the locale of the best pizza. Some stand ready to fight to the death should anyone suggest that the best pizza outside of New York is not inferior to the worst pizza in New York. I have learned not to tell these people about some of the real lousy slices I've had in Manhattan.

Others are the same way about Chicago, Boston or certain parts of New Jersey, and I even have a friend who stands ready to argue that there's no better pizza than one can find in Reno, Nevada.

Anyway, once you decide what city defines your ultimate pizza, you can get down to the second stage of the argument, which is where — outside of that town — someone makes a reasonable facsimile of it. In Los Angeles, I have heard people swear that the closest thing to "New York Pizza" is to be found at Mulberry Street Pizza (in Beverly Hills and Encino), at Frankie & Johnnie's (in Beverly Hills, Brentwood and Hollywood), at Damiano's (on Fairfax, across from Canter's), at Rocco's (in the Miracle Mile and on Vermont, across from L.A. City College) and at Johnnie's (many locations). I like all of these places and wouldn't argue for or against any of them.

Two or three years ago, there seemed to be a consensus winner among my acquaintances. That was Vito's Pizza, over on Vermont in the building that is now a Rocco's. I know people who'd drive clear across town, passing all those other places, to get pizza from Vito's…and I admit, it was pretty good. Many went into mourning when Vito and his brother closed down, reportedly moving back home to Chicago.

Well, they're back. I haven't been there yet but I received an ecstatic e-mail from one buddy that Vito has reopened on La Cienega Boulevard. He's in a strip mall somewhere between Melrose and Santa Monica Boulevard…and it's all so new that Directory Assistance doesn't even have a listing for them yet. This is exciting news, especially if it turns out that I'm in their delivery area, as I may well be. I'll give them a try just as soon as Creamy Tomato Soup Month is over at the Souplantation. That's all I'm eating until April 1. If anyone gets there before me, let me know if the new Vito's is as fine as the old Vito's.

Ever since Deal or No Deal debuted, I've been TiVoing the show and watching it with increasing speed. Thanks to my remote control, I now make it through an hour episode in about seven minutes. When I pause, I can see that the program has gotten a bit more condescending and a lot more repetitive. There have been many games that were simply not interesting because the contestant knocked out the big amounts near the beginning so the whole hour was to see if they'd go home with $10,000 or $20,000.

Last night, they had on a two-hour episode and I guess I should insert the SPOILER ALERT right about here in case you recorded it and haven't watched yet.

Still with me? Fine. Last night, they had the second half on a game from the previous episode plus two complete games. No one won huge amounts. All three players went home with amounts under $100,000 — but what was interesting was that two of them picked the case with the million dollars in it. One sold it for $99,000 and the other — who obviously got out way before the producers and audience were expecting him to — took $81,000.

Now, neither one of those folks were likely to take home the million. They play out the game after the deal is accepted and the last guy, the one who settled for $81 grand, would have reached the point where he had either $75,000 or the million and he had a bank offer of, I believe, $561,000. If someone got that far, they almost certainly would have grabbed the dough. I doubt anyone would go down to the last case unless their last two choices were both six figure amounts.

Still, it's fascinating that the million was picked in two of three consecutive games. I guess that's why I still TiVo the thing…to see those odd moments. This one was pretty odd.

You may not want to sit through this entire clip but it's kinda interesting in a way. In 1972, the Goodson-Todman game show company revived their old game show, The Price is Right, in a new, more energetic format. In addition to the daytime version hosted by Bob Barker, there was a syndicated nighttime version hosted by Dennis James, and this is a sales film for the syndicated version. It was sent to stations to try and get them to buy the show…which, at this point, apparently had not taped any episodes. One presumes that if they had done some, they would have included scenes. Instead, Mark Goodson and Dennis James have to sell the show by explaining what it is, how it works, etc. There is a clip but it's of James filling in for Monty Hall as the host of Let's Make a Deal.

This runs close to fifteen minutes and it's amazing that the show sold. It sounds complex and boring, whereas the TV show they were hawking was pretty simple and fast-paced. You have to wonder what they thought the station managers would think they were buying — the idea of pricing games? The charisma of Dennis James? It may have just been the past track record of Goodson-Todman but for some reason, Goodson doesn't itemize their many past hits. If I were running a TV station and they sent this to me, I think I'd have wondered why they were so sure they had a great show when they obviously hadn't done one episode yet. But it worked.

Having troubles with your computer? A lot of people recommend Iolo's System Mechanic to fix them.

Having no troubles with your computer? I recommend Iolo's System Mechanic to create some.

Seriously, I had one or two things wrong on each of my two main computers. I installed System Mechanic and suddenly had ten or fifteen things not functioning properly. I uninstalled it and now I'm back down to the one or two things wrong on each.

Moral of the story: Well, you can figure out what the moral of the story is — something about not believing that every piece of software out there will do what it's supposed to do on your computer…or even what it does on other folks' computers.

Over at the Sequential Tart website, Katherine Keller makes her case that the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego should become the annual Comic-Con International in Las Vegas. I don't think this is very likely. For thirty-some-odd years, there's been talk of the convention moving to another city but it's never really come from anyone who would actually be involved in making that happen.

In any case, Katherine concludes her essay by saying, "Based on these facts, name me one reason it should not be Las Vegas." Since I know Vegas pretty well, I'd like to give her a few, starting with the weather. The average July temperature in San Diego is 84 degrees and it's usually 5-10 degrees less around the ocean where the convention center is located. The average July temperature in Las Vegas is 106. How's that for one reason?

I would also question a lot of those facts or at least their relevance. Yes, McCarran Airport in Vegas can handle a lot more traffic than San Diego. It has to handle a lot more and it isn't doing that good a job of it. They've been adding new terminals and gates at a feverish rate and so far, they haven't been able to gain on the steadily-increasing visitor traffic. Deutsch Bank recently released a projection of tourist volume that does not seem to be available online except behind one subscription firewall…but trust me. They calculated the number of planned hotel rooms in Vegas (42,000 more in the next five years) and said that McCarran will fall even farther behind. In fact, the hotels have been counting on some (not all) of those problems being alleviated by a new $4 billion airport planned for Ivanpah Valley, which is thirty miles outside Las Vegas. But the most optimistic date for its completion is 2017.

If we're going to compare the two destinations in terms of how easy they are to get to, I think San Diego wins. Most San Diego attendees are coming from portions of California to the north. Many go by train and they can't get to Vegas that way since there's no train service to Las Vegas. There's also very little bus service. Most drive…and the drive to Vegas, at least from Southern California, is a mess these days with I-15 being intermittently closed or limited for construction. One of the appeals of Comic-Con is how many attendees come from Hollywood…and it takes twice as long to drive to Vegas from Los Angeles as it does to drive to San Diego from Los Angeles.

Ms. Keller touts the wonders of the Vegas monorail system as being able to deliver people easily to the convention center. Well, it is if you're near one of the seven places it stops. It's useless for most hotels in Vegas and it's even useless for the seven locations it serves when it's out of commission, which is a large percentage of the time. It may become totally useless if it closes, which it may do because it's losing a fortune.

Yes, Vegas has more convention center space. It's also vast, cold and impersonal. People complain about having to walk too much in San Diego. These are all people who've never attended the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. More space is not a good thing if it fragments the event to the point you never get from one area to another.

The C.E.S. is worth mentioning because it's the biggest convention in that city and at 150,000 attendees, it's as big as the Comic-Con will be in a few years if Comic-Con doesn't do something silly like move to Vegas. It's no easier or cheaper to get a hotel room in Vegas during C.E.S. than it is to get one in San Diego during Comic-Con. Just to give you an example, I went online and checked out the Riviera Hotel in Vegas, which is one of the crummier places one might stay there. During normal, non-convention times, a room at the Riv is $69 a night. For the dates of next January's C.E.S., which is not even on a weekend, they're already asking $269 a night. The Bellagio, which is a very nice hotel, is asking $499 a night and the cheapest room at the Venetian is $549. If it were a weekend, those rates would certainly be doubled. These prices should tell you something about demand and availability. During C.E.S., all the hotels either sell out months in advance or charge like that…or both.

And let's also note that the C.E.S. is in January. They're smart enough not to try to get people to go to Las Vegas in the Summer. When they used to have two Consumer Electronics Shows per year, they had the Winter one in Vegas and the Summer one in Chicago.

Lastly: The convention, when it's in San Diego, is almost the only game in town. Comic-Con would not be that big a deal in Las Vegas. No one convention is and the hotels in Vegas were not built to serve the convention center, whereas the main ones we stay at in San Diego were. The Comic-Con actually changed the face of convention-going in San Diego and is deemed important by the locals there. Vegas wouldn't care. We'd just be one of many conventions that week or that month, and the esteem in which we were held, and the "clout" of the convention organizers would have everything to do with how much money we spent while we were there. Somehow, I don't think comic book people would spend anywhere near as much as the people who attend the C.E.S. in Vegas, most of whom seem to be Sony and Panasonic execs on unlimited expense accounts. I also don't know what exhibitor space at a Vegas convention would cost but I'll bet it would be a lot more expensive than what Sergio Aragonés and Stan Sakai pay for their tables in San Diego.

So there's a whole bunch of reasons and I'll bet if I spent another twenty minutes on it, I'd come up with twenty more…and I say this as someone who likes Las Vegas, who goes there often. But I go there for totally different reasons than I go to the Comic-Con in San Diego. Vegas is designed to lure you to the showrooms and Blackjack tables when you're not at your convention. At Comic-Con, I don't want or need all that enticement. When we go to Comic-Con in San Diego, we're the show and we bring our own entertainment. Oh, and I just remembered a biggie: At Comic-Con, they don't expect you to go pay good money to see Wayne Newton or Carrot Top. There's two more reasons.

Still no sign of Disney releasing Song of the South on DVD. But over at the Disney Family Museum website, this page has a nice article about the film and some online video clips shot on the set. So if and when they do put the film out on DVD, there could be some great extras included.

Arnold Drake, one of comics' most acclaimed writers, died this morning. We all knew he was sick. He collapsed a few days after attending the New York Comic Book Convention (Feb. 23-25) with, they said at the time, "a touch of pneumonia." Other complications were found and he never left the hospital.

During his career, he wrote all the major characters for DC Comics but distinguished himself especially with his co-creations, Deadman, The Doom Patrol and Stanley and His Monster. He was also known for long stints writing the comic book adventures of Bob Hope and Jerry Lewis, most of which were drawn by the also-recently-deceased Bob Oksner.

Drake was born on March 1, 1924. At age 12, a bout with scarlet fever kept him confined to his bed for a year. He spent much of the time drawing his own comics and, though he later did do some cartooning work, he found that his primary interest was not in drawing characters but in deciding what they'd say and do. That sent him off on a writing career and he studied Journalism at the University of Missouri and later at New York University.

Then he met Bob Kane, the official creator of Batman, who happened to be a neighbor of Arnold's brother. He worked with Kane on a few projects and the artist introduced him to the editors at DC. Before long, Drake was writing for DC books including House of Mystery, My Greatest Adventure, Mark Merlin, Space Ranger, Batman and Tommy Tomorrow. Most of his new creations in the sixties came about because an editor said to him, "This comic is in sales trouble and needs a new feature."

My Greatest Adventure was down in sales so Drake, working with artist Bruno Premiani and fellow writer Bob Haney, invented The Doom Patrol, a band of misfit heroes very similar to Marvel's X-Men, which went on sale shortly after. Strange Adventures was in sales trouble so Drake, working with artist Carmine Infantino, came up with the acclaimed Deadman character. The Fox and the Crow was down in sales so Drake, teamed with Bob Oksner, fashioned Stanley and His Monster — a highly-imaginative kids' comic that preceded (but contained many of the elements of) the newspaper strip, Calvin and Hobbes.

But Drake was a feisty guy who had trouble getting along with editors. In the late sixties, he fought with the management at DC, partly over what he considered inept editorial direction and partly over business matters. He was a loud voice in a writers' revolt during which several of the firm's longtime freelancers were demanding health insurance, reprint fees and better pay. Many of them were ousted, including Arnold, and he then worked for a time for Marvel before settling down at Gold Key Comics for many years. For them, he wrote many comics including The Twilight Zone, Star Trek and a particularly long and delightful stint on Little Lulu.

Arnold wrote other things including plays, movies (Who Killed Teddy Bear? and The Flesh Eaters, among others) and novels. In the fifties, he authored a long comic book in book form called It Rhymes With Lust for a small publisher and later touted it, with some justification, as the first graphic novel. (Dark Horse will soon reissue it.) He also worked extensively with a group called the Veterans Bedside Network, writing materials to aid in the rehabilitation and nursing of men and women who'd served in the armed forces.

Very active on the convention circuit in recent years, Arnold at one point began crusading for the industry to establish something he wanted to call The Bill Finger Award. Finger, hailed by Drake and others as the unbilled co-creator of Batman, died in poverty and Arnold felt that there should be an award to shame people and companies that mistreated talent. In 2005, quite independently, a Bill Finger Award was created, this one to honor veteran writers who had not received proper recognition for their work. The first recipient of it was Arnold Drake.

Arnold was one of my favorite comic book writers of all time. Much of his early work was uncredited and I was delighted, as I learned more about who'd written what, to find him as the common thread among some of the best comics DC produced in the sixties. (The Showcase issues of Tommy Tomorrow are especially brilliant, and they were written by Arnold.) I was privileged to get to know Arnold and to spend many a convention panel and telephone conversation, hearing him discourse on his favorite subject in the world, which was creativity. At the time of his death, he had several projects in the work and the urge to write something wonderful was undiminished. We are all a little worse off that Arnold isn't writing and I can't begin to measure what those of us who considered him a good friend have lost.

In the seventies, after The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and All in the Family redefined what a sitcom could be, there were probably thousands of attempts to reinvent the variety show. Most never got farther than pitches to networks but every year, there were at least a dozen such pilots, some disguised as one-shot specials, and a few became series. The consensus seemed to be that the day was past when you could just take someone like a Danny Kaye or a Carol Burnett and build a show around them and their versatility. That kind of multi-faceted entertainer was becoming extinct. The new ideas were mostly matters of concept — some format that allowed for songs and sketches, often incorporating elements of a sitcom and/or Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In. One that tried to the latter combo was the short-lived 1971 series, The Funny Side.

It was produced by Bill Persky and Sam Denoff, and I'm not sure who else worked behind the cameras. In front of them, they had a stock company of ten regulars, five men and five women representing five different kinds of couples. The pairs were Warren Berlinger and Pat Finley as the "blue collar" couple, Dick Clair and Jenna McMahon as a more or less "wealthy" couple, John Amos and Teresa Graves as a "minority" couple, Michael Lembeck and Cindy Williams as a "young" couple and Burt Mustin and Queenie Smith as an "old" couple. The host of it all was Gene Kelly and I thought it was a pretty clever show that deserved to run longer than the three months it lasted. It would have if the show had been as funny and charming as Mr. Mustin was, off-camera.

I have a personal story here. In '71, I was nineteen years old and writing all sorts of things — mostly comic books published in languages other than English — for the Walt Disney Company. Often when I wasn't attending my classes at U.C.L.A., and sometimes when I should have been, I'd take a bus out to Burbank and spend the morning on the Disney lot, which was a much more magical place then than it is today. Back then, everyone who worked there felt like they were a part of Walt's heritage and that they had a job for life…maybe not a great-paying one but there was a sense that being part of D*I*S*N*E*Y (and having all that job security) made up for low wages. These days, it seems like everyone who works there thinks of themselves as an extended Temp toiling for whoever runs the company this week, watching their paychecks get slashed to compensate for CEO bonuses.

In 1971, I worked mainly for a fellow in his late thirties named George Sherman, who was involved in all sorts of publishing projects. We got along great and he was always recommending me for other jobs on the lot and to outside companies doing Disney projects, especially anything involving Goofy. I was his big Goofy writer. I owe a lot of my comic book writing career to that man.

George was out sick for weeks at a time (he died not long after) but when he was there, I'd sometimes spend mornings in his office, go to lunch with him and then in the afternoon, I'd walk the two blocks to NBC Studios and sneak or talk my way in to watch the taping of a Bob Hope special or Laugh-In. Some days, I could see The Dean Martin Show rehearse without Dean Martin or even watch the legendary Mr. Carson do what he did so well.

One day, George and I were lunching in the Disney commissary when a man came by and said hello. It was Gene Kelly. I have no idea how George knew him but he knew him. The great star of so many movie musicals was on the lot to talk to someone at Disney about some project. He sat and talked for a bit and told us about a new TV show he was taping over at NBC, one that wasn't yet on the air. It was The Funny Side. George told him that I was known to prowl the NBC corridors and Mr. Kelly invited me to visit the set whenever I wanted…say, later that day. I accepted and that afternoon, I didn't have to talk my way past the security guards. I was, ahem, the personal guest of Mr. Gene Kelly. Matter of fact, for the next few weeks when I went there, the guards just waved me through because they figured I was associated with him.

I'm not sure if The Funny Side ever taped with a live audience but they didn't have one that day. For most of the afternoon, I was the live audience. They spent about an hour with Kelly, who was dressed in a tux and looking just like you'd want Gene Kelly to look, doing a very simple dance routine on a conference table with the cast seated all around it. It should have taken ten minutes but there were technical snafus and delays, and you could see Kelly was getting annoyed but he kept his temper in check.

When he was done, he wasn't needed for a while so he came out to the bleachers and sat with me and we talked for…well, it must have been an hour. It was another of the many "I'd give anything for a tape recorder" moments of my life. We talked mostly about current Hollywood and how Gene (he insisted I call him that) didn't like the way it was going. He was more interested in discussing his recent work as a director — on Hello, Dolly and A Guide for the Married Man — than in talking about the MGM days, but he did tell me a long, X-rated anecdote, the point of which was that Louis B. Mayer preached core American morality to all whenever he wasn't making starlets earn their contract renewals on or under his desk. Of the film of Hello, Dolly, Gene said his great directoral achievement was to make it appear that Barbra Streisand and Walter Matthau did not want to strangle each other.

Later, wearing the same tux, Gene went down the hall and taped some spots for The Dean Martin Show, some of them even with Dean. I was invited to tag along and there Kelly introduced me to Lou Jacobi, Kay Medford, Nipsey Russell and to Harry Crane, who was the head writer and as famous in the business for creating great jokes as Gene was for dancing in inclement weather. It was quite a magical day, though Gene showed no interest in continuing our casual friendship and I never spoke to him again after that. I was impressed with how much energy he had (he was 59 then) and how he truly worked hard at everything he did. I guess that was one of the reasons he was such a great performer. I felt bad for him when I heard The Funny Side was cancelled because he seemed to think it was his last chance to prove he had a place in the current entertainment industry, as opposed to the "old-timer" circuit.

Here's a little less than five minutes of The Funny Side, and it should give you a pretty good idea of what the show was like. My thanks to someone named "Wookie" who wrote to say he put this clip up on YouTube, just because I once mentioned the program here. So does anyone have any clips of Stubby Kaye hosting Shenanigans? How about Our Place starring Burns and Schreiber? Or that season of Dean Martin Presents the Golddiggers that was taped in London with Marty Feldman?

Jeffrey Toobin explains all about the Scooter Libby case and about Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame and why it matters.

Apparently, theories are already starting to pop up on Ye Olde Internet that Richard Jeni didn't commit suicide and was the victim of, as they say, foul play. "Foul play" is one of my favorite euphemisms for murder. It makes it sound like someone violated the Infield Fly Rule.

Two different e-mailers wanted to know if I was suggesting that when I said there was no sign that the guy might kill himself. No, I was not. I don't know anything more about it than was in the Associated Press report to which I linked. As near as I can tell, none of the speculators have any reason at all to speculate, either…which doesn't mean this might not blossom into a great tabloid news story. I mean, Anna Nicole is kind of winding down and Britney Spears has run her course. Nancy Grace and others on cable would probably love to find even the remotest justification to introduce the "m" word into this matter. Remember: You don't need to believe there's anything to a scandal in order to cover it in the news these days. You just need to be able to say "someone" thinks something might have happened.

As a quick change of partial subject, I wanted to repeat one of the funniest things I ever heard Richard Jeni say. I mentioned it back here but to save you clicking, I'll just reprint it…

A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following…

Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"

I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.