GSN is currently running its 2006 World Series of Blackjack, one installment per week. I enjoyed the 2005 competition for reasons explained here but this year's is a lot less interesting. For one thing, the contestants aren't as interesting. For another, the hosts aren't as good. (They keep saying things like, "He really wants to win this one," as if it's news that the players have some interest in not losing.)

There's also a lot of annoying editing and telescoping in each episode. Each game consists of many hands of Blackjack. How many? I'm not sure because they don't tell you and they occasionally skip a hand or two, even though something significant may have happened in one of them. They'll cut to a little background video on a player or the hotel and when they return to the game, the hosts will say something like, "Well, while we were away, Rosie Piggleworm hit a couple of Blackjacks to take over the lead." Can you imagine watching a baseball game where they don't bother to show you the fifth and sixth inning and instead they just tell you that someone hit a Grand Slam to put their team ahead? A very silly way to cover a competition.

But it's worse than that. Two new rules have been added — rules that, as far as I know, exist in no other Blackjack game or tournament anywhere in the world. One is that twice during the game, the dealer deals out something called a "knockout card." When that shows, it means that the player in last place at the end of the following hand is eliminated. That forces some players to abandon the careful strategizing that is the fascinating thing about Tournament Blackjack and just make reckless, all-in bets.

Even worse is that each player gets one "Burger King Power Chip." This is a shameless bit of product placement and almost every time it's mentioned, the host or player works the fast food chain's slogan into the dialogue and says something like, "This would be a good time for him to have it his way with the Burger King Power Chip." When you play your B.K.P.C., you can discard any one card you've been dealt and get a new one in its place…a cute gimmick that, again, doesn't relate to anything one might encounter in a real Blackjack game. (In tonight's match, a player may have lost not because he played Blackjack poorly but because he didn't know how to use his Burger King Power Chip.)

There's still some nice suspense and moments when you can hear the wheels turning as good players compute their bets. But last year, I looked forward to the weekly installments and this year, I don't care much if I forget to set my TiVo. Maybe they'll learn from this before the 2007 games.

News sources say that George W. Bush will cast the first veto of his presidency if the Senate, as expected, passes legislation to expand federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research.

I don't get it. Why doesn't he just sign it and issue a signing statement saying it doesn't count?

Got a good one for you this time. The funniest act I ever saw in Vegas — and maybe the funniest I've seen anywhere — was performed by a man named George Carl. Mr. Carl passed away in 2000 but for the fifty or so years preceding, he could be found on stages around the world doing his pantomime act. Johnny Carson called it "the funniest twenty minutes in show business" and that's about as good an endorsement as you could ever want.

What did Carl do for those twenty minutes? Well, he threw his hat in the air and caught it. He tried to play the harmonica. He struggled with a tray full of musical instruments. But mostly, he got tangled in the microphone cord.

When I saw him in Vegas in the eighties, he had honed this act to such perfection, it was like a fine ballet. He knew how to get a laugh every second he was on stage. In most cases, the rest of the show he was in featured spectacular-looking naked women but even the men in the audience were wishing there was less of the ladies and more of the sad-faced little man who couldn't work a microphone properly.

This clip runs a little more than four minutes and therefore can only give you a brief taste of what he did. Trust me: It got funnier and funnier, especially during his battle with the mike cord as things grew steadily more dysfunctional. He dropped it down his pants, he got the cord between his legs, he wrapped his face in it…he just kept surprising you with his every move. I wish I had a longer sample but you'll have to settle for just this much of the incomparable George Carl. If someone out there has any tape of his entire routine, please let me hear from you.

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.