Very nice birthday celebration last evening for Marv Wolfman. His charming spouse Noel arranged it all at an outlet of a chain I'd never heard of before — Dave and Buster's. Here's their website if you're interested. They're kind of like Chuck E. Cheese for a slightly older audience. They have video games and non-video games and pool tables and private rooms for parties and apart from the fact that it meant driving to Arcadia, it was a great experience.

After grub (but before cake and present-opening), we all fanned out through the place for some serious gaming. My longtime friend Alan Brennert claimed he'd never played any of these games before…then went up to a claw machine and, first time out, snagged a very nice wristwatch. In the background, one could almost hear the manager yelling at someone, "What's wrong with that claw machine out there? Somebody actually won something!" I did great at Skee Ball. In fact, I'm seriously considering quitting this silly writing business and seeing what kind of living I can make hustling Skee Ball.

Carolyn and I almost didn't make it there because we did something extremely foolish out in the parking lot. We tried to follow the signs. Please note that if you ever go out to the Westfield Mall in Arcadia and want to find the Dave and Buster's, it's easy. Just do the opposite of what the signs tell you. If they have an arrow pointing left, turn right and vice-versa. It'll get you right there.

Frank Rich has a good piece on the recent revelations of White House spying without proper warrants and secret torture programs. Here are two key paragraphs…

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers [The New York Times and The Washington Post] were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

I never understood how it hurt anything, aside from the White House's reputation, to reveal that our government was not following the rules about warrants when wiretapping terrorism suspects. Is there a terrorist anywhere who didn't suspect his calls might be monitored? Especially with John Ashcroft announcing, every time he upped the terrorism alert level, that they'd picked up "chatter" of something in the works.

My TiVo recorded (without being asked) A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum from some cable channel the other day. This is the little description in the TiVo listing…

Comedy, Musical. Zero Mostel, Phil Silvers, Jack Gilford. A con-man slave and his sidekick fake a courtesan's funeral to fool a pimp in ancient Rome.

"Pimp?" Forget for the moment that in the film, they actually fake the funeral to fool a Roman Captain. The character to which they are presumably referring, Marcus Lycus, is described as a buyer and seller of the flesh of beautiful women. I suppose the word "pimp" can be applied to him but come on. I suppose that when they run The Ten Commandments, the listing will refer to Moses leading his people out of the 'hood.

Everyone seems to be talking about the new revelations about the NSA phone-monitoring project…and I must say that my initial reaction was that it was an egregious violation of civil liberties.

But I admit that, like you, I don't know everything about the program and that to some extent, I'm working backwards from my growing distrust of this administration. I am not alone in this attitude and we are not necessarily wrong. Almost everyone in America is getting suspicious to some extent of the White House claims as to what's legal. Especially since it often seems to go no deeper than, "Whatever Bush wants done."

So here's what I would like to know. As we've all heard, most telecom companies went along with the program but Qwest did not. This may not have been, as some are suggesting, because they were certain it was illegal. It seems more like Qwest wanted more proof than the Bush administration's say-so that it was Kosher. Here's a snippet from The New York Times…

The telecommunications company Qwest turned down requests by the National Security Agency for private telephone records because it concluded that doing so would violate federal privacy laws, a lawyer for the telephone company's former chief executive said today. In a statement released this morning, the lawyer said that the former chief executive, Joseph N. Nacchio, made the decision after asking whether "a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request." Mr. Nacchio learned that no warrant had been granted and that there was a "disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," said the lawyer, Herbert J. Stern. As a result, the statement said, Mr. Nacchio concluded that "the requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act."

Sounds to me like Qwest would have cooperated if some court, like the FISA court, had merely signed off on the program. The firm's stance may have been a courageous defense of its customers' freedom but it could also have been a cover-yer-ass fear of finding itself in a massive class action lawsuit. You know…the kind people are now vowing to file against Verizon, BellSouth, etc. I'm big on civil liberties but if I was running a big telecommunications company and the President of the United States (or his reps) came to me and asked for what they've asked for, I'm not sure my response wouldn't have been, "Fine. Just give me a written guarantee that this is legal. I don't want to say yes and then a year from now, some court rules it's unconstitutional and people sue and I have to go before my stockholders and explain why I didn't get more assurance."

Which brings me to the part I'm wondering about. The Bush administration makes the claim that this program is absolutely, unquestionably legal and absolutely, unquestionably necessary. But as with many of their approaches to surveillance, they would rather cripple the program than go in and have a judge sign off on it. They decided to do without monitoring QWest's 15-18 million subscribers. So what happens if they're tracking the phone calls of Al Qaeda Member #1, who has Verizon, and he keeps phoning Al Qaeda Member #2, who has Qwest? Doesn't the trail of information end there? Wouldn't it have been better to get the warrant so Qwest would get with the program and tell them who Al Qaeda Member #2 had called?

The position of the Bush administration with regard to spying on people seems to be that there's no doubt it's necessary and no doubt it's legal. In fact, it's so necessary that they don't want to take a chance some judge will think it's illegal and stop it. But of course, there's no doubt it's legal.

No wonder this guy's at 29%.

Here at newsfromme, we always like to note the birthday of the real veterans of the comic book industry…the guys who were in it at the start and who are (happily) still around to remind us of our great and glorious heritage. Respecting one's elders is important, which is why we've noted the birthdays and honor of men like George Tuska (age 90), Paul Norris (age 91) and Creig Flessel (age 94).

In that tradition, we note the birthday of Golden Age Great Marv Wolfman who reaches the big six-oh today. When I was a small boy, barely able to read, I discovered his work on…oh, was it Tomb of Dracula? Or Nova? Or Blade? It was Daredevil, I think. It's hard to remember back that far. He was also Marvel's Editor-in-Chief for a time, back when they used to hand out that job like some kind of deluxe No-Prize. Later, he went on to DC and did The New Teen Titans and Crisis on Infinite Earths and Superman and he also killed Supergirl, for which some of us will never forgive him. In spite of this, we wish him a happy birthday and will be present this evening for a quiet, low-key celebration.

On a more personal note: I began corresponding with Marv around 1968 and first met him in person in the DC offices in 1970. He was standing outside an office that was then shared by two editors — Julius Schwartz and Dick Giordano — and was being yelled at by a writer named Robert Kanigher. Mr. Kanigher wrote some fine comics in his day but he was given to rambling, incoherent tirades and I rescued Marv from one. He has been forever in my debt since and we became…well, I'm not sure if "friends" is the proper word since he is so many years my senior. Mostly, he envied my youth and skills, whereas I respected his age and endurance. I still do, so I am pleased to wish him a happy birthday and to hope there will be more in the future. Even if he did kill Supergirl.

Here's the text of the speech John McCain gave today at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. There are a number of eloquent, intelligent portions and if this speech had been given somewhere else ten years ago, I'd probably suggest you read it and appreciate the speaker's reasonable approach and seeming respect for differing viewpoints. But since around half past the Monica Lewinsky brouhaha, McCain has disappointed me time and again in this regard. The "maverick" stance looks more and more like a calculated marketing scheme.

Returning from my local 24-hour Sav-On drug store — where if you go at 2 AM, you can pick up a prescription without waiting in line — I found this fellow on my back porch, partaking of food left out for the stray cats. He interrupted his dining briefly to watch me walk into the house then returned to the Friskies. When I got my camera, he shrugged as if to say, "This is the price I pay for free food." Or maybe it was, "Hey, if I'm going to have to model for you, you could at least provide dessert."

This is the first raccoon I've actually seen in quite a while but I know they've been around. Lately, I get up in the morning and find that plastic dish halfway across the yard. I think after he licks it clean, he uses it for a frisbee.

Here's a possible entry in the list of network time slots being juggled to annoy us. NBC has been advertising a two-hour special edition of Deal or No Deal for next Monday night at 8 PM. It includes "surprise" appearances (surprises to anyone who hasn't seen the promos) of Regis Philbin and Jay Leno. It's followed at 10 PM by a special, heavily-promoted episode of The Apprentice.

But now, George W. Bush has announced he will address the nation Monday evening at 8 PM Eastern time, which is 5 PM Pacific. Standard operating procedure would be for the network to just bump everything later on the schedule. Bush's remarks (plus whatever additional coverage is done) are expected to consume 25 minutes. Ordinarily, that would mean that Deal would start at 8:25, Apprentice at 10:25, the late local news at 11:25, Leno at Midnight instead of 11:35, etc. Somewhere in the wee, small hours of the AM, they'd make up the missing time.

That's how it would work on the east coast. On the west, they'd just cover the speech as part of the 5 PM News and then all the prime-time shows would run as scheduled.

NBC is now announcing on its website and elsewhere that Bush will speak at 8 PM, Deal will start at 8:25 and Apprentice will still start at 10 sharp. The person at NBC who told me this (someone not in the programming department, I should emphasize) says they're editing Deal or No Deal down to 95 minutes…but only for the East Coast.

I'm not sure I believe this. It's not unprecedented for breaking news to cause one time zone to miss a hunk of a show but it usually isn't planned this way. I can't recall any network actually cutting a different version of a program to air on one side of the country. Let's see if that's actually what they're doing…and if so, if TiVo finds out about it in time to update.

Here's another one of what people always refer to as the Max Fleischer Superman cartoons. Actually, the Fleischer Brothers (Max and Dave) were ousted from their own studio before this one — "The Mummy Strikes" — was made in 1943. The history of early theatrical animation was filled with tales of animation producers losing their own studios or their star characters to their distributors and no tale was sadder than that of the Fleischers. Their operation was renamed Famous Studios and it went on producing cartoons without them. You'll notice the names of Max and Dave Fleischer appear nowhere on this cartoon.

One name you will see is that of Jay Morton, who's listed as writer. He has sometimes been credited with having devised the famous Superman tagline, "Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive," etc. This was probably one of the last cartoons he worked on as about this time, the studio moved from Florida to New York and he elected to not move with it. I wrote about him here a few years ago in conjunction with his obituary.

Okay, here's something I'm trying to figure out and I'll bet someone reading this can help me…

John is Jerry's uncle. Marsha is Tom's sister. John marries Marsha. What relationship then is Tom to Jerry? He's not his uncle. Is there such a thing as an uncle-in-law? Or does this make him some kind of cousin? Is there any tidy term to describe this relationship? I'm an unmarried only-child so this stuff is alien to me.

Some of you will probably recognize the real-life people I'm writing about but that's not important. I've asked about a dozen people and gotten several different answers, many of them accompanied by "Well, I'm not sure but…" So please only write and tell me if you're reasonably certain. And thank you in advance.

Over on his fine weblog, Ken Levine tells a great casting story. Read this post for Part One and then read this one for Part Two.

Do you know how to bone a turkey breast? How to temper eggs? How to peel pearl onions? You can learn how to do all these things and more thanks to some nifty online how-to videos offered up by Cuisine at Home magazine. They're on this page.

Wanna get a lot of e-mail? Just make a vaguely disparaging comment on your weblog about Macs. You should see what I'm getting…and some of them are reacting like I made a vicious racial slur about them and their mothers.

There's nothing wrong with owning a Mac. Just as there was nothing wrong with owning a Betamax until, of course, they stopped making them. In the technological age though, we commit to formats and accept their limitations. You stay with videotapes and you can't get certain films because they're only available on DVD. You buy a car with a stick-shift, you have to put up with valets and car wash attendants who can't drive a stick. My friends who own Macs are all pretty happy with them except when they see a great Windows program with no Mac equivalent.

This is why there are new Macs that run dual-format and software to run Windows programs on Macs. They're probably great machines but I'm not ready to junk my three PCs and plunge into a new system just because I don't like one piece of Windows-based virus protection software.

I'm on a deadline this weekend so I can't respond individually to you all. But most of you are reading a lot more into that comment than was there.

I've just about had it with Norton Anti-Virus. I've been a Norton customer since…well, somewhere here I still have a 5" floppy of The Norton Utilities with a photo of Peter Norton printed on it. That's how long. I don't think Mr. Norton has anything to do with the current software products that bear his name, which may be part of the problem.

Norton Anti-Virus probably does a decent job of protecting me from dread computer viruses…although it's failed me a few times, once because I contracted a virus so new that no one in the anti-virus community had heard of it yet. If I'd gotten it a week later, I would have been fine…but some things are beyond our control. My big problems have to do with the fact that it doesn't play well with other programs. Four times now on my three computers, I've installed or uninstalled something else and Norton A-V has gone kablooey. Each time, the solution has been the same. I wait 15-20 minutes for someone I'm pretty sure is not on this continent to come online for a "live chat" and they tell me to do a complete uninstall, including running a program to cleanse my system of all Norton and Symantec products, and then do a reinstall. This takes around an hour each time…and I can think of so many other things I could do with that hour. For instance, I could wait on hold for the people who handle tech support for Microsoft Money. I think they have two guys and they each work an hour a month.

My computer guru Bill Goldstein recommends that I try AVG instead, and I intend to give it a try. I'm also instituting a new policy. I can't do anything about Microsoft products but otherwise, I ain't installing anything that has a fee-based Tech Support phone number. I never called the one for Norton but every time I saw they had one, it made me think they're not all that unhappy when their product doesn't work properly. In any case, the next uninstall I do of Norton shall be my last.

(And don't write me and tell me I should buy a Mac. People who have Macs remind me of myself when I had Beta and I kept seeing movies I wanted to own come out on VHS only.)

Preston Blair was one of the great animators. He was responsible for the Red Hot Riding Hood animation in several Tex Avery cartoons, for the hippos and other memorable characters in Fantasia, and many more classic examples of making drawings move. But his most lasting contribution to the art may rest with a couple of books he authored for the Walter Foster art book series. They were repackaged a few times under different names — Cartoon Animation, Advanced Animation, How to Animate Film Cartoons, Animation: Learn How to Draw Animated Cartoons and others.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Blair books to animation. Darn near every kid who ever thought it might be neat to learn how to do that started to learn how to do that from these volumes. Many who took expensive courses in art schools reported that it was more educational just to page through the Preston Blair books and copy his work. (And speaking of copying: Blair's drawings have been ripped-off countless times for advertising and other purposes. I believe this current edition contains all or most of both volumes and if you buy it, you'll recognize a lot of duck and pig drawings.)

What many did not know until recently was that Blair had to redo his first book after its initial publication in 1947. He'd used drawings he'd done for MGM and a few from Disney, which caused legal problems. That edition was redrawn and he refashioned all the images of Tom & Jerry and Screwy Squirrel and Droopy and other established characters into generic versions. The drawing below shows how one rabbit received a makeover.

Copies of the first version are rare and prized. My pal Jerry Beck scored one from another great animator, Dave Tendlar, and now you can experience it. ASIFA-Hollywood is archiving and sharing rare treasures of animation and they've scanned Jerry's copy and posted it here and here. This is a valuable resource for wanna-be animators, and I'm sure seasoned professionals can learn from it, as well. A lot of those who do cannot teach but Blair was that rare talent who could so something and explain clearly how he did it.