Next weekend — July 13-16 — the fifth annual Game Show Congress is being held at the Hilton Burbank Airport and Convention Center, which is located across from the airport in Beautiful Downtown Guess Where. This is a yearly gathering of game show buffs and the program includes panel discussions and interviews with folks in that line of work, rare game show screenings, re-creations of classic game shows and a luncheon which will honor Peter Marshall (the "Master of the Hollywood Squares") and Mark Itkin, a top agent with the William Morris Agency who has been responsible for the packaging of many top quiz programs. Among the other celebs who'll be present are Betsy Palmer (from the original I've Got a Secret), Rose Marie and game show hosts Wink Martindale, Tom Kennedy, Monty Hall, Jack Narz and Larry Anderson. For details, go to this website.

One of the big events of the G.S.C. will be an installment of the live version of What's My Line? that I've written about several times…here, for instance. This is the show that takes place every Wednesday evening at the Acme Comedy Theater in Hollywood and it's a clever, loving resurrection of a great program, expertly hosted by J. Keith van Straaten. It's also coming to an end, at least for now. The performance this Wednesday night is the last at the Acme for the foreseeable future. So if you've always wanted to see this — if you have and want to see it again — hurry to the Acme this Wednesday evening. Details are over here.

After that, there's only one more installment of J. Keith's What's My Line? scheduled and it's at the Game Show Congress on Friday, July 14 at 8 PM. They're doing the show for the G.S.C. and have we got a treat for you! Ordinarily, admission is $20 but as a reader of this website, you can get in free. All you have to do is R.S.V.P. Write to Jim Newman (who's done such a fine job producing these shows) at wardenclyffe@eudoramail.com. Tell him you're a devout news from me reader and that you want to attend. Then show up Friday night at the Hilton Burbank, enjoy the show and see if you can guess the Mystery Guest before the panel (which will include the lovely Betsy Palmer).

While I'm at it, I might as well mention that Saturday and Sunday, the Hilton Burbank is also playing host to the Hollywood Collectors Show, where celebs sell autographed photos of themselves. Some of the Game Show Congress stars will be there along with Debbie Reynolds, Mickey Rooney, June Foray, Alan Young, Betty Lynn, Gary Coleman and many, many more. The full current list and more info can be found at this website.

The full programming schedule is up for the Comic-Con International. You can read the Thursday schedule. You can read the Friday schedule. You can read the Saturday schedule. You can read the Sunday schedule.

Or you can just do the smart thing and click below. This will take you to a list of the program items being hosted by Yours Truly, which are the ones you really don't want to miss.

This article in The Sunday Times (the one in London) says that Afghanistan is going poorly and that the Taliban could be making a comeback. Hope they're wrong but I fear they're not.

I don't think I've eaten one since I was about twelve…but for some reason, I got to thinking today about the favorite cookie of my childhood. The Sunshine company put out these things called Toy Cookies, which were like animal crackers but in the shapes of toys. You could eat one shaped like a drum, one shaped like a blimp, one shaped like a watch, one shaped like a truck, etc.

That was not particularly the appeal of them. The appeal was that they tasted pretty good, regardless of the shapes. Actually, the only interesting thing about the shapes was that in every box, you always found a few malformed ones and it was fun to guess what they looked like. I once got one that I think started out to be a baby carriage but wound up looking more like a penis. I was afraid to eat it.

When I hit my teens, I abandoned Toy Cookies, not because I no longer liked them but because they seemed like a baby cookie…a very bad reason to switch to Chips Ahoy or Oreos. I don't know when they stopped making them but I recall seeing some more sophisticated packaging in the market, an obvious and apparently unsuccessful attempt to position the product for a slightly older audience.

What finally occurred to me — and I wonder if it occurred to the manufacturer — is that the very shapes had gotten out of date. Alphabet blocks? Toy soldiers? By the sixties, those weren't toys to most kids. They should have made the cookies look like Barbie dolls, skateboards and Aurora monster models. (Today, they'd have to look like XBox controls and Star Wars action figures.)

I don't particularly miss Sunshine Toy Cookies. Matter of fact, I've given up all kinds of cookies and don't miss them one bit. But when I came across the above pictures of the old box and bucket packaging, they brought a smile to my face. And I had to share them here, just in case they have the same effect on you.

Conan O'Brien gives a commencement speech at Lincoln Center for the 2006 graduating class of Stuyvesant High School. The video is handheld and shaky but not unwatchable. It runs a little under 17 minutes.

Okay, so I go in to buy gas and I stick my credit card into the little slot in the gas pump. A screen then asks me to enter my zip code and press Enter. I guess this is to confirm that the person using the credit card is either me or a thief who's stolen my credit card and my driver's license.

Tom Richmond has become one of the new star artists of MAD Magazine. You can see why over at his new, redesigned website. You can also read his weblog which I plug here, not because it contains nice mentions of me but because…well, that's reason enough. The new issue of Mad, by the way, contains Tom's well-drawn parody of Superman Returns.

Where the hell is Matt? And who told this guy he could dance?

It can be dangerous to go see your friends in plays. I mean, what happens if the whole evening exudes the distinct aroma of fetid mackerel? What do you say to them when you see them after? Do you lie your butt off and say it's Tony Award material? Or do you try to get away with some non-committal statement that they'll (probably) eagerly infer is praise? In the past, I've gone the latter route and tried to get by with lines like…

• "It was an evening I'll never forget!"
• "Only you could have done this!"
• "You made such interesting choices!"
• "Words are inadequate to describe what I'm feeling at the moment!"
• (My favorite:) "Of all the evenings I've spent in the theater, this was certainly one of them!"

Fortunately, I needed no such dodges last night when I saw my pal Jim Brochu in his new one-man play, Zero Hour. Jim knew the late, great Zero Mostel and has now managed to magically — don't ask me how — turn himself into the guy. The play takes the form of a long interview with Zero, conducted in 1977, just before he was to begin rehearsals for a play called The Merchant. Unmentioned in Jim's text is that Mostel was stricken during those rehearsals and never got to open in that play.

During the two-or-so hours Zero discusses his life, his capricious stardom, the tragedy of blacklisting, the near-tragedy of a bus accident that almost cost him his leg, his marriage, his fatherhood, his major roles, his painting and most of all, his anger. The play is at times very, very funny and — at times — very, very sad. Best of all, Jim captures the basic absurdity of the way the man thought, rambling from topic to topic, going from non sequitur to non sequitur and having them somehow flow logically from one to the next. It's probably as close as you could ever come to spending time with the genuine article. Jim even re-creates Mostel's testimony before the Senate subcommittee and throws in a few choruses of "If I Were a Rich Man."

Should you be in or around Hollywood through mid-August, I suggest you go. It plays at the Egyptian Arena Theater, which is an annex to the famous Egyptian Theater movie palace up on Hollywood Boulevard. Details can be found here. And if you're not in this area, just wait. I have a feeling Jim is going to be doing this all over America before he's through.

From Dave Sikula comes an identification of the clip in the previous posting…

In re, the Gene Kelly/Woody Allen clip, based on the poster for Half a Sixpence (which ran from April 25, 1965 to July 16, 1966) in Shubert Alley, I'm guessing we're looking at a bit of Gene Kelly: New York, New York, which according to this site and the IMDb, aired on February 14, 1966 with Julie Andrews as the other guest star. "This is not available on video, however, if you visit New York City or Los Angeles you can view it at the Museum of Television and Radio." Weird to see the two of them together. Good catch.

That sounds like it. Thanks, Dave.

I'm not entirely sure where this is from. It seems to be a sketch from a Gene Kelly TV special of some sort with Woody Allen as a guest. I'm guessing 1968. Anyway, it's a little less than four minutes so give it a look…

Five.

…before this year's Comic-Con International kicks off in San Diego. In case you're interested, the long-range projections of the National Weather Service suggest mostly clear skies with highs around 75° and nighttime lows around 65°.

The convention folks have posted the schedules for Thursday Programming and Friday Programming with the other two days to be posted this weekend. But you don't care about that stuff. You care about the programs I'm hosting. Here's that schedule…

Notice that this year, we're doing not one but two big Cartoon Voice Actor panels — one on Saturday, one on Sunday. These are always a highlight of the con so you might want to make sure you catch one…or both. And of course, there'll be the annual Quick Draw! competition and the annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and the Golden/Silver Age Panel and…well, just read the list. A lot of fun events. Hope to see you at some of them.

I'll post the answer later today.

A nice review of the Sergio Aragonés issue of Solo.