This is sad but it's something you oughta see. It's a short bit of home movie footage shot on 11/22/63 in Dallas — John F. Kennedy and the First Lady in the motorcade, only a minute or two before shots rang out. I don't think there's anything in here that gives us any additional clues as to whodunnit but it's a piece of history.

For the record, I'm a recovered conspiracy nut. Back in the seventies, I thought the answer to "Who Shot J.F.K.?" was anyone or anything other than a lone assassin named Lee Harvey Oswald acting alone. Snipers on the grassy knoll, Secret Service men programmed a la The Manchurian Candidate, the three hoboes, chickenmen from Saturn…all more likely than one loner with a Mannlicher-Carcano, thought I. But the more I read, the less I could defend any of those theories and I came around to the belief that not only did Oswald act alone but that not a one of the arguments against that scenario was valid. I further came to the view that it was pointless to discuss this with anyone so I don't. I also will not discuss the validity of any religion, where to get the best pizza, Fred Astaire vs. Gene Kelly, what's sexy, or any other topic about which no human being has ever changed another's mind.

Here's a few seconds from Dallas. If you're over fifty, you know exactly where you were when this film was shot.

The new "Conservative version of The Daily Show," The Half-Hour News Hour, debuted last night on Fox News to killer reviews and not just from Liberals, either. There are enough articles online telling you how lousy it was so I thought I'd focus on (a) why it was destined to stink, at least at first, and (b) why it might still be a big hit for Fox.

Why it was destined to stink: Well, for one thing, when someone else has an acclaimed hit and you come along and say, "We're going to do our version of that," you're setting yourself up for failure. People are not going to just expect a good show from you. They're going to, not unreasonably, expect something as wonderful as the hit upon which you're basing and selling yourself. It's like being Frank Sinatra, Jr. No matter how good he is on stage — and actually, he's pretty good — all audiences seem to do is mutter, "Not as wonderful as his father." An impossible standard.

You're also starting from scratch but likening yourself to something that's long since gotten its act together. The Daily Show wasn't all that terrific when it started, either. But The Half-Hour News Hour isn't being compared to Jon Stewart's first weeks or even to Craig Kilborne's break-in period.

More importantly, comedy does not arise from nowhere. You can't just go from zero to sixty. If someone came to me waving large sums of cash and said, "Put together a Conservative comedy show for us," my first action would be to scour the country for existing troupes and comedians…people who've been doing it for a while and who've refined their acts in smaller venues. When Lorne Michaels started Saturday Night Live, he signed performers like Dan Aykroyd and Gilda Radner and Chevy Chase and John Belushi who'd already been working together at Second City or in the National Lampoon shows…and a lot of what they did on SNL the first year was material (or variations on material) they'd perfected in stage appearances.

I don't know where they got the folks who write and appear on The Half-Hour News Hour. They may all be very talented on an individual basis. But as we've learned from a lot of failed SNL imitations and even from a lot of SNL seasons when new cast members from different walks were thrown together without breaking in as "featured players," it's hard to just all start all being hilarious together. You can't even find a tone or an attitude that way. The only SNL imitation that had any real critical or ratings success was SCTV, which starred a long-established troupe that had been working together for years and already had polished routines and characters.

So I'd look for, say, a comedy troupe out there already doing Right-Wing Comedy. I'd hire them and use them as the core of my new show. And if I couldn't find such a troupe already in existence…well, that would tell me something.

All of this is above and beyond the fact that Conservative comedy is, almost by definition, difficult. It's like (I've said this before) making a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one. There's plenty of phoniness and arrogance to puncture on the Left but it's tough to structure a joke which is the rich making fun of the poor, or those in power picking on those who aren't. It's not impossible but it's tough, just as it's tough to fill even a half-hour of political humor if you restrict yourself to one side of the aisle. The Executive Producer of The Half-Hour News Hour has been quoted as saying he looked around and didn't see anyone making fun of Hillary or John Kerry. Which only tells us he's never seen Jon Stewart's show, the program he's supposedly replicating.

Nor has he apparently seen Leno or Letterman or Conan or SNL or any of those shows. They all routinely rip into Liberals and Democrats and, yes, they do more about George W. Bush but that's not bias. That's because he's in power and giving them so much to work with. When it was Bill Clinton in power and Monica came to light, the jokes flowed freely in that direction.

So why do I think The Half-Hour News Hour might still be a hit? That is, assuming Fox doesn't yank it off, ratings be hanged, out of sheer embarrassment? Because it doesn't have to be funny. It only has to be mean.

There's a market out there for mean. There are people out there who'll pay good money to hear someone say Hillary Clinton is an ugly cow or Ted Kennedy is a pathetic drunk. No joke necessary. If you don't believe that, listen to some Talk Radio shows or, better still, check out what Dennis Miller now does on stage. Someone sent me a bootleg MP3 of a recent Miller live performance and I was so disappointed. The man was once so witty, not necessarily about politics. But at some point — I forget which of the many Dennis Miller Shows was on the air at the time — he adopted a kind of "I'm too hip to be entertaining you people" attitude. He goes out and just says Hillary's evil, Bill's a horny bastard, Al Gore is a fat liar, et cetera. And oh, yeah. Bush is a real man and why don't all these midgets get off his back? Some people love it.

I suspect Miller had a rocky period there before audiences knew what to expect when they paid to see the new him. But around the time he became the first professional topical comedian in history to announce he would not do jokes about the President of the United States, he found his audience…or rather, they found him. Those people may find The Half-Hour News Hour. They aren't the majority in America. They're a shrinking minority, which seems to be making them madder and madder and more likely to turn to whoever tells them what they want to hear. But there are enough of them to sell out all the Dennis Miller concerts and there may be enough of them to keep The Half-Hour News Hour afloat until its makers figure out what the show is.

This is a rerun. I linked to this commercial some time ago but the video was deleted from the website that hosted it. Here it is on another one. Nothing says "sixties" like this kind of ad.

It's one of my favorite commercials for one of my favorite products of the period — Adams Sour Gums. I was never much for chewing gum but I liked their Sour Orange and occasionally their Sour Lemon, and would pick up a pack now and then until they stopped making all four flavors. Recently, the company that now owns Adams brought back the two flavors I never liked — Sour Apple and Sour Cherry — in a limited release. Naturally, this prompted me to call up and demand they reissue the Sour Orange or at least the Sour Lemon. A nice lady on the phone said they'd look into it. That was a year ago and I'm still waiting, Nice Lady on the Phone.

Here's the commercial. That seems to be actor Barry Newman, who later starred in a fine lawyer series called Petrocelli, doing one of those jobs that actors do before they get a series.

There's a lot of talk out there about "supporting our troops," much of it from people who've confused that with supporting George W. Bush. In some cases, I think they're deliberately confusing the two.

Thinking Bush has sent them on the wrong mission — or even on the right mission but managed it poorly — is not a lack of support for our soldiers. The kind of thing described in this article is, almost by definition, a lack of support for our soldiers. And Bush loyalists ought to be furious about it even if it might reflect poorly on their side.

A few weeks ago, I bought one of these. It's the Cruzer Crossfire, made by SanDisk…a little USB connecting flash drive that with the cap on is a bit smaller than the standard-size Pez refill pack. It holds 4.0 GB of whatever you want to put on it. Cute, huh? Well, it would be if it worked.

It did for a time. I copied all my vital files onto it and used it to update them between my three computers. Then a few days ago, the thing stopped working. I plug it into a USB port and nothing happens. I've tried it on eight USB ports on three computers and none of them recognize its existence.

So I called SanDisk…and I'll say this for them. They have people on duty at Tech Support even on Sunday and I wasn't even on "hold" for very long. But really, all the guy there could tell me was that once in while, there's a defective one and they'll replace it if I send it back, or I can do what may be faster, which is to take it back to the place of purchase.

Which brings me to my problem. I put all my vital files on it — credit card data, bank accounts, passwords, pictures of various comic book industry figures naked…do I really want to send this to a total stranger at some distant company? I mean, they say they'll just destroy it and ship me another but do I want to trust this? Maybe it will work on some computer. Maybe it'll work on the computer of that kid at the Returns Desk at Costco.

Hmm. Something to think about…

We hereby inaugurate a new, recurring feature on this weblog. It's called "What Do You Want To Bet?" Here's our first "What Do You Want To Bet?"

Fidel Castro's niece says her uncle is in "stupendous" health. What do you want to bet he's dead before the month is out?

The Extinct Attractions Club is a group that is interested (maybe "obsessed" would be a better word) with documenting the history of theme park attractions, especially at Disneyland. They have a whole line of DVDs they've produced with rare footage of the Magic Kingdom and interviews with the folks who built or otherwise contributed to the things you could once do for a "E" ticket.

Here's a little preview of their overview of the Haunted Mansion. In it, you'll get to see some footage of the late Thurl Ravenscroft, the man with the greatest singing voice that ever existed on the planet. You know him best as Tony the Tiger but he can be heard all over Disneyland, and we're glad the Extinct Attractions folks interviewed him so extensively.

This is just to remind you all that tomorrow (Tuesday) is National Pancake Day. If you go to an IHOP (those places we used to call The International House of Pancakes) between 7 AM and 10 PM, they'll give you a free short stack of buttermilk pancakes. All the details are over on this page but really, that's all you need to know. Go to one. Ask for free pancakes. Eat free pancakes. Go home. Simple as that.

Another pioneer of the earliest days of comics has died. It's legendary artist Bob Oksner and the cause of death, earlier this evening, was pneumonia. Born October 14, 1916 in Paterson, New Jersey, he originally embarked on a legal career at New York University. It was while he was editing the campus humor magazine that he met many cartoonists and began flexing his muscles in that area. Before long, he'd changed majors and enrolled also at the Art Students League. He received an M.A. at Columbia University, then taught art and history in high school until he broke into comics. His earliest work was in either 1939 or 1940 for Funnies, Inc., which was an art service that supplied comic book material to a number of publishers, including Timely (now Marvel) Comics. Timely liked to hire artists away from Funnies, Inc. and by '42, Oksner was working directly for the publisher on strips including The Destroyer and Marvel Boy, while also occasionally drawing for other houses. In 1945, he began drawing a syndicated newspaper strip, Miss Cairo Jones, that lasted until 1947.

Sheldon Mayer, an editor at DC, had been a fan of Miss Cairo Jones and he invited Oksner to work for DC…an association that kept Bob occupied for the rest of his career. He started on The Black Canary and other strips featuring pretty ladies and soon segued to humor features, especially ones based on licensed properties. Oksner drew The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis until that team split up, whereupon his assignment became The Adventures of Jerry Lewis. He also drew Sgt. Bilko, Doberman, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Pat Boone, The Adventures of Bob Hope and non-licensed humor titles like Leave it to Binky, Miss Beverly Hills, A Date With Judy and Stanley and His Monster. One of his more memorable stints was as artist/co-creator of the short-lived The Angel and the Ape in the late sixties. He received the National Cartoonists Society Award in its Comic Book Division for 1960 and 1961 won the Shazam Award in 1970 for Best Pencil Artist (Humor Division).

When DC didn't have humor work for him, he did romance tales for Girl's Love Stories and other such comics. Later, when they weren't publishing either, Oksner worked on Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Lois Lane and other adventure-type strips, especially those featuring heroines. He did a long tour of duty as Curt Swan's inker on Superman and drew a number of Superman stories on his own and illustrated many classic covers.

Over the years, Oksner occasionally returned to syndicated comic strips. From 1952 to 1955, he drew a strip based on the I Love Lucy TV show and from 1967 to '68, there was Soozie, a very well-drawn strip about a very well-built young lady. His longest run in syndication began in '69 when he began collaborating with his long-time friend, Irwin Hasen, on the scripts for Hasen's strip, Dondi. Oksner did the plots and Hasen wrote the dialogue. This lasted until 1986 when the strip ended.

That was a year or two after Oksner had retired completely from drawing…and I don't mean just from drawing for DC. He gave away his drawing table and art supplies, and when fans contacted him to inquire about commissions, his reply was, "Sorry…I don't have anything to draw on." A few years later, he weakened enough to do a few sketches but when I interviewed him at the 2002 Comic-Con International, he said he was quite content to have put drawing behind him. (The above photo of him was taken at that convention. Thanks to Jackie Estrada for supplying it.)

That convention was the only opportunity I ever had to meet Mr. Oksner and spend time with him, even though we'd both worked briefly on a mid-seventies comic book adaptation of the TV show, Welcome Back, Kotter. He was a charming gentleman who was amazed and delighted to discover he had so many fans. It seemed like every thirty seconds for all four days, someone was coming up to him to say how much they'd always admired his art. Especially the way he drew the ladies.

An issue of Alter Ego devoted to Oksner's work is just about to go to press.

Let's catch up with what folks are writing to me. This one's from Starmaxx and it's in response to that post I put up about replacing human cashiers at parking lots with machines…

I can tell you that these machines came into vogue at the parking lots that service the Washington, D.C. metro-rail (similar to the subway) in the last few years after management found out that the "manned" parking lot attendants were stealing lots of money. Apparently, it went into the millions and had gone on for years. Why an audit never caught this still remains a mystery, but that just goes to show you how the D.C. local government is run!

I had a horrible experience when I attended the 2006 baseball opening day for the Washington Nationals and decided to take mass transit. Went into the metro parking lot, but could not find any parking spaces after looking for 30 minutes. Tried to get out, but you needed the "fare card" to use in the automated machine — but you could only buy the card inside the Metro complex (which meant you had to find a parking space and take a 5 minute walk). What a quandary. Finally, a friendly attendent showed me an empty space. What lunacy — but I now always have a spare card in my glove compartment.

I can understand wanting to eliminate theft but it seems to me it would be quite easy and cheap to have a TV camera monitoring the exit cashiers and counting how many people exited and paid. I don't understand how it's cost efficient to have machines collecting parking fees, especially when you need to have human beings around to jump in when the machines fail or when "the system" doesn't work for some customer. My old pal Pat O'Neill, who does not live in Southern California, writes…

Wait a minute here — you have to pay to park at a shopping mall in Los Angeles? The fact that you're spending money in the stores isn't sufficient revenue? Do any of the stores offer to validate?

f I drove to a mall and found out they wanted me to pay for the "privilege" of leaving my car in the lot while I went in and spent money, I'd quickly find some other place to spend my money!

Don't think that hasn't occurred to some of us. But yes, there are malls out here that don't validate…where you can go in and spend thousands of dollars but you still have to come up with a buck to get out. The Beverly Center and the Beverly Connection, which are across the street from one another, both do that…and I'm guessing they haven't suffered a noticeable loss of consumers or they wouldn't do that.

Both once had free parking if you were there two hours or less. The Beverly Center started charging a buck minimum a few years ago and now the Beverly Connection, which is just reopening after a major renovation, is going that way. It'll be interesting to see if they stick with it. The revamped mall is not yet fully open — some stores aren't finished — so they aren't expecting a lot of business yet. Once they get to the point where they do, they may find that parking fee keeping people away.

Also, the other day, I posted a link to a video and wondered if that was Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters singing. I got some interesting responses, like this one from Fred G. Vigeant…

Most definitely Glenn on the Raid commercial. While the song was made popular by the Kingston Trio as the "M.T.A.", the tune is from a song known as "The Wreck of the Old '97," which every folk group, including the Weavers and Leadbelly sang. It may be interesting to you as well, that the Limeliters were formed as a "song try out group" for the Kingston Trio. Lou Gottlieb, who was singing with the Gateway Singers at the time, wrote a couple of songs that were part of the K.T. repertoire. Somebody (it may have been Lou or possible Frank Werber, the Kingston's manager) got the idea that another group could be formed that could "try out" new songs in front of an audience to see they would work. Thus, the Limeliters were formed (named after the club in Aspen, I believe, where they started out) and soon had their own following and recording contract.

A couple of folks thought it wasn't Yarbrough but they were just guessing. Here's another expert opinion from Michael J. Hayde…

First of all, that's definitely Glenn Yarbrough. Nobody could duplicate that voice. Second, I suspect the banjo player is fellow Limeliter Alex Hassilev.

As to why Yarbrough (and possibly Hassilev) did the commercial probably has a lot to do with timing. The Kingston Trio's "M.T.A." was released in the spring of 1959, and peaked on the charts around July. Coincidentally, that's the month the Limeliters were formed. Yarbrough and Hassilev had been working as singles and occasionally as a duo at a club in Aspen called the Limelite. They were joined by Lou Gottlieb, who'd been working as an arranger for…The Kingston Trio. Originally, Gottlieb thought the three of them could record demos for the K.T., but it was clear that the potential for something greater was present.

In any event, that Raid commercial probably was one of many projects the group members took on before, during or after their first (not-so-successful) album on the Elektra label came out in 1960, but prior to their signing to RCA Victor, which put them into the big time. I should add that no folk group did more TV commercials than the Limeliters; it was they who introduced the "Things go better with Coke" jingle, and how I'd love to see that turn up on your website someday.

We aim to please. Here are the Limeliters — who I always liked a lot better than the Kingston Trio, by the way — performing that lovely jingle with Mr. Yarbrough in fine voice as the lead singer. And because no detail's too trivial for me to not point it out, I think the short delivery guy in this commercial is the fine character actor, Bill McCutcheon. Thanks to everyone for all the mail.

A man named Douglas Feith seems to have been designated as Official Scapegoat for all the bad intelligence work that got us into the war in Iraq over, at best, erroneous assumptions.

I do not mean to suggest Mr. Feith is blameless. Indeed, the fact that he's now making the rounds, denying he ever said all the things he said does not speak well for his integrity. But he may be drawing a disproportionate share of criticism that should rightly be dispersed over a wider pantheon of folks who screwed up royally.

In any case, he has achieved something amazing. How badly does a Bush administration official have to dissemble before Fox News calls him a liar?

Step right up. I have your Sunday Video Link right here, friends. It's another clip from The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, in this case from October 4, 1959. Dinah and Groucho Marx perform "Peasie Weasie," which was one of those weird old songs that only Groucho seemed to ever sing.

It dates back to a touring vaudeville act that he and his brothers began doing around 1910. They actually had two acts then. One was called "Fun in Hi Skule" and the other was "Mr. Green's Reception." As I understand it, they did "Fun in Hi Skule" for a while and then developed the second act, which was kind of a sequel with the same silly characters. In some theaters, they did one of the two acts and in some, they did both and "Peasie Weasie" was usually the finale in one act or both. Here's Groucho and Dinah taking a crack at it…

I keep alluding here to the upcoming labor nastiness in Hollywood which may include either a monumental strike by the Writers Guild and/or the Screen Actors guild, or one or both of those unions getting its teeth kicked in, or both. There are some other possibilities but I'm not expecting any that involve everyone linking arms, singing happy songs around the campfire and life as we know it continuing unchanged.

This website has a very simple explanation of how the process works, at least from the WGA perspective. I disagree with the suggestion that my Guild "lost" the 1988 strike. In fact, I think one of the problems we've gotten into is this tendency to view a labor negotiation like a Jai Alai game where one side must emerge as undisputed winner and the other as loser. If you can get away from that mindset — and sadly, some folks like the bloodshed and don't want to — it's possible to arrive at a deal that works for both. It's also possible to wind up "winning" a strike the way some wars are "won" — i.e., fewer of your people got killed. So you still lose when you win. I believe the future of labor negotations, at least in Hollywood, involves moving away from the win/lose attitude and getting to the "works for both sides" mentality. I'm not sure though that the folks with whom we bargain are there yet.

Anyway, like I said, I don't think we lost the '88 strike. I don't think we won, either. I think we were forced into a situation where being on strike for five months was the less damaging of two bad options…and there were only two. When we get closer to when the '07 strike might commence, I'll try to write more about what I think happened in '88. But in the meantime, read that piece to which I'm linking. It's a good primer on the situation.

Yet another chapter in the long-running Winnie the Pooh legal battle. The Disney folks lost the latest round.

The late composer Meredith Willson wrote "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and all the songs in The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown — tunes like "76 Trombones" and "Til There Was You" and "I Ain't Down Yet." But for some, his most memorable tune was one that was drilled into them in their school gym classes in the early sixties.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched something called The President's Council on Physical Fitness and asked Willson to compose an exercise-oriented theme song. Willson responded with "Chicken Fat," a record sung by Robert Preston and distributed by the zillions to physical education classes across the country. In some schools, it was played every day and when students from that era hear it, they reflexively drop and begin cranking out push-ups.

Our link today is to a clip of the song as performed on The Dinah Shore Show on October 6, 1961. Dinah and Nanette Fabray give it their all, along with Dinah's dancers and brief appearance by Al Hirt and George Montgomery. It's an odd presentation of an odd song, and for the full effect, you might want to do a couple of sit-ups as you watch. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for recommending this one.