I've mentioned Paul Harris before here. Paul hosts a very fine radio interview show every weekday afternoon on KMOX in St. Louis and he has an amazing knack for, first of all, getting very interesting people to talk with him. He's also darned good at extracting interesting and informative answers from those interesting people.

This afternoon, he had on former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter. Of all the "talking heads" who've been out there telling us what's happening (and what will happen) in Iran and Iraq, Ritter may well have the best track record for getting it right. His chat with Paul ran a little less than a half hour but if you want to know more about weapons — and hear why the Iran situation may not be as ominous as it sounds from some reports — that could be time well spent. Here's the link.

Here's an important (I think) article by Glenn Greenwald and I'll try to summarize its thesis. It's that for years after 9/11, Bush's defenders met almost every criticism of the administration by charging that the critic hated America, was pro-terrorist, was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, etc. But now, a lot of those Bush defenders are looking to distance themselves from him and his actions and are engaging in the same kinds of comments they previously found so treasonous.

You ask a question here, you get answers…

• JEFF GRUBB: I think the characters come from the old Saturday Evening Post. They had a humor/cartoon page in the back, with these little guys in the title bar.
• LES DANIELS: I can offer a tentative tip on that cartoon. When I was a kid in the 1950s, my parents had a sub to the Saturday Evening Post, which interested me mostly for the cartoons they ran. I recognize the style of "You want it when?" from the Post of a half a century ago or more. I'm sure this artist was a regular there, but I can't remember his name. I realize this is a pretty slim lead…
• BEN HERNDON: Double check me, but I always had the impression these laughing characters were drawn/created by Stan and Jan Berenstain (of "Berenstain Bears" fame…)
• RUSS MAHERAS: I'm almost positive that cartoon illustration was drawn by Orlando Busino, and I'm also pretty sure it originally appeared on the cartoon page of the Saturday Evening Post.
• MIKE LYNCH: The "You want It When" guys are a question I've had too. I'm a magazine cartoonist, as well as an NCS member. I've always been interested in the magazine cartoonists. I've talked about that iconic image to a lot of the pros. The consensus is that it was drawn by Henry Syverson. There are some images here.
• GALEN FOTT: Looking on Usenet, someone wondered this back in 1993, and they were referred to some books by Alan Dundes, titled with variations on Urban Folklore from the Paperwork Empire. So maybe you could find the answer there.
• NATE BUTLER: I think it's from the Saturday Evening Post…from the top of that page (toward the back, as I dimly recall) that had all the jokes or gag panels or whatever. I think the "You Want It When?" wording got added later maybe. I don't remember the name of that cartoonist who always did those little big-nose characters on the top of that page of the Post, but I'm pretty sure this is where the mystery art came from originally.
• BRAD CASLOR: I'm not sure if this was the first use, but weren't the laughing cartoon guys the recurring mascot on the "Post Script" humour page of the Saturday Evening Post in the 1950s, possibly drawn by one of the regular Post cartoonists like John Gallagher?
• TIM (no last name): I absolutely don't know who drew it but the guys in the drawing are dead ringers for cartoon characters that were in the Saturday Evening Post when I was a kid (60s). In fact, I believe they were at the top of the page but I can't find an example anywhere yet (if I do I will send it). I think what you're talking about was created by ripping off these guys from the page and adding "you want it when" but that's just a theory.
• JOHNNY LEE ACHZIGER: This won't help much, but I remember back in the early 1960's (when Xerox machines still required a couple trays of wet chemicals to make copies) watching my Dad make copies of the same sort of cartoons like this at his office. There were a bunch of different ones, but they were in the same style. So even way back when, they were around.
• SCOTT SHAW!: That cartoon — or at least, the original version from which it was traced (over and over and over, etc.) — was drawn by magazine gag cartoonist Henry Syverson, who regularly did such silly drawings for Saturday Evening Post's page of cartoons. I think that the "You Want It When?" was added by someone else.

I think Scott and the others who've fingered Henry Syverson are right. The samples Mike Lynch pointed us to seem to confirm it. So for now, I'm willing to go with Syverson and what I'm wondering is if he or the Post ever marketed a poster or sign of the drawing or if its life in Xerox just began with someone blowing it up. For now, thanks to all who've sent in their thoughts.

Where is this drawing from?

For more than 35 years, I've seen this thing posted in offices, stores…pretty much any kind of establishment where someone has to produce something on some sort of schedule. I know it's been at least 35 years because that's how long ago it was that my mother brought a 99th generation Xerox of it home from a store where she was working and asked me to please trace a new, clean copy for her boss. Even by then, I'd seen it taped up on the walls of places of business, and what I saw was always a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a tracing of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a tracing of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox of a…well, you get the idea. This thing has been passed around more than the hooker at the 99-Cent Only store.

I remember once hearing a cartooning authority (there are such people) claim that the R. Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" poster and its various bootlegs was the most widely-distributed cartoon image of its day. When he said that, I thought, "Not even close." The "You Want It When?" cartoon has to have it and all others beaten. And I think it's kind of interesting that in all the times I've seen it, I've never seen any other caption put on it. You could apply all sorts of sayings to it but it's always "You Want It When?"

So where did it start? All those Xeroxes of tracings of Xeroxes had to begin with some artist sitting down and drawing the first one for some purpose. Was it a greeting card of some kind? A poster? A graphic in a magazine article? Maybe someone did draw it just to put up in one office and a co-worker who liked it made a copy and sent it to someone else. And then that person copied it and sent it to someone else who copied it…

I'll be surprised if anyone has an answer but I have to ask, just in case. Who drew it in the first place? And for what purpose?

Why is it that we never get upset at our presidents for not knowing things? "My staff got overzealous and did it without telling me" seems to always be a perfectly acceptable excuse. Or just "No one told me" or "I was given faulty intelligence." Shouldn't the first responsibility of any president of the U.S. be to know what's going on in his administration? And to fire those who supply him with faulty intelligence?

So now we have yet another case where something in a George W. Bush speech was not merely untrue but there was solid evidence at the time he said it that it was not true. On May 29, 2003, Bush announced that two trailers seized by U.S. and Kurdish troops were mobile biological laboratories. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction," he declared. Now it turns out that in a report filed two days earlier, the crew of the Pentagon-sponsored research mission had unanimously concluded the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons.

Bush's foes will charge that it's Bush caught in a lie. Bush's defenders will say "It's not a lie. He didn't know." I'm inclined to side with the latter but to suggest that this is nowhere near an acceptable excuse. It bothers me that a man who at any moment may make a decision that will get people killed is not operating with — and apparently not even insisting on — the latest, most accurate information available. That should bother the people who think Bush is a brilliant leader. Even a brilliant leader can make the wrong call based on bad data.

It's a movie trailer. More than that, you need not know.

Here's a good online audio interview with Stephen Sondheim. The two parts together run around 32 minutes.

Hey, guess what TV show is making a comeback for one night. Okay, you saw the picture above, you know: On April 18 in Hollywood, a new episode of The Dick Cavett Show is being taped for Turner Classic Movies in what I'm told is an updated version of Mr. Cavett's old set. In September, TCM is going to begin airing a package of eight of Cavett's old shows spotlighting great stars of the silver screen, and added to the mix will be the new episode they're taping with Mel Brooks as the guest. This is because apparently TCM plans to blanket its schedule with Mel Brooks movies that month. Boy, would I like to see this lead to a steadier diet of Dick Cavett programs, both old and new. People forget what a really good interviewer he was.

Cavett and Brooks actually have a prior relationship. Many years ago, Mel did a series of radio commercials as The Two Thousand Year Old Man and because Carl Reiner was unavailable or uninterested (or both, I suppose), Dick Cavett was the interrogator. As I recall, he did quite well in a demanding job.

In other Brooksian news, we are hearing again that a musical version of Young Frankenstein will be making its way to Broadway before long. A lot of people I know have said they think this is bad idea but most of them felt a stage version of The Producers was a bad idea, so let's wait and see.

Also, a boxed set of Brooks movies has just come out and some people I know are more than a little pissed. It includes Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, Silent Movie, Robin Hood: Men in Tights, To Be or Not to Be, History of the World, Part 1, The Twelve Chairs and High Anxiety, all for (at Amazon) a little under seventy bucks. That doesn't sound bad if you love them all and haven't already bought some…but how many people are in that situation? I mean, it seems to me that if you had the slightest interest in a couple of those films you'd have purchased them by now.

Of these, High Anxiety, To Be Or Not To Be, Silent Movie and Robin Hood: Men In Tights have not previously been released on DVD. So should you be a Mel Brooks completist, you have to either buy a boxed set and pay for movies you've already bought…or wait until Fox Home Video gets around to issuing those four titles in individual releases. So what we have is another attempt to get us to buy movies we've already purchased, which seems to be the ongoing goal of the home video business.

And don't you just know that a couple years from now, they'll bring out The Complete (No Kiddin') Mel Brooks DVD Collection containing the remaining movies (Life Stinks, Spaceballs, etc.) and they'll put in bonus features and commentary tracks and newly-found outtakes to render the current set obsolete? Plus, of course, that'll be Blu-ray or high-def DVD, which are both plots to get us to buy everything another time. It's enough to make you re-enact the campfire scene from Blazing Saddles, all by yourself.

I haven't linked yet to an unabashed music video so here's "Weapons of Choice" by Fatboy Slim. The neat thing about this is seeing Christopher Walken (and his stunt double) dancing around the lobby of the Marriott in downtown Los Angeles. Walken was a dancer earlier in his career, long before he took over Bruce Dern's old job of playing half the psychos on the silver screen. The video was directed by Spike Jonze, it took two days to shoot and there's an awful lot of well-done, not-too-obvious CGI in the last part. Mostly, I just like watching Walken move, which is almost as much fun as hearing him talk like someone doing an impression of Christopher Walken. I still think that if the long-rumored remake of the musical Damn Yankees ever comes to pass, he'd make the perfect Applegate.

I think I post too often on this site. People get used to it and then when I go eighteen hours without putting something up, I get all these e-mails asking if I'm all right, if there's been some disaster, etc. Either that or it's something really bad…like my Internet connection is out.

The connection is fine and I'm all right…but the last four or five days, I've been battling a bad cold that decided that since I was sick, I might as well have one of the worst cases of conjunctivitis my doctor has seen in years. That's not as awful as it sounds because this afternoon, he prescribed what can only be called a "wonder drug"…and five hours after taking it, my eyes are halfway back to normal. He said they'd be 95% healed by tomorrow evening and I think I'm going to beat that timeline. Moral of the story: I should have gone to see him on Friday instead of thinking I could conquer it with over-the-counter drops and eye wash.

Jack Kirby created a comic book character named Darkseid whose eyes emit a kind of red radiation of death. That's how I've felt the last few days…but now it seems to be over.

I'm behind on a script and way behind on e-mail — what are the odds? — so bear with me. And thanks for the messages of concern, partly for my health but mostly for that of my Internet connection. We may soon reach the stage in this world where you can be declared legally dead if you aren't seen in public for seven years or if you go 36 hours without checking your e-mail.

Here's another one of those commercials where you can barely believe someone went to the time and expense…but they did. The product is for the Sony Bravia line and I would love to have been in the meeting where someone said, "Hey, I know how to sell our new television sets. Let's go to San Francisco and dump a quarter of a million Super Balls down a hill!" I'm not saying this was a bad idea. I'm just fascinated as to how you get to it. And I suppose I'm wondering how many times someone watches this spot on TV and says to his wife, "Hey, Marion…they dumped 250,000 Super Balls down a street in Frisco. I think I'll buy a Sony Bravia!"

(I've always loved those commercials where they show you vivid colors and beautiful pictures like you'll get if you buy one of their sets. They assume you'll forget that you're seeing those vivid colors and beautiful pictures on the set they want you to replace.)

There are a couple of different versions of this Bravia spot around. This one is two and a half minutes. If you'd like to view it larger on your monitor and with better resolution, go to this page. And if you're interested in what's involved in sending that many bouncey-balls down the boulevard, there's also a "Making of…" documentary that runs a little under seven minutes. At no point in it do they tell you how (or even if) they cleaned them all up.

One other thing before you watch it: It's a marvelous piece of filmmaking but does it really look to you like 250,000 balls? Doesn't look like anywhere near that number to me. They had to have had nets to catch the balls, right? I mean, you don't just leave rubber balls all over the city or let them bounce down into the business district…and there's a limit to how many the crew and the spectators could have carted off. If you catch them, you can use them over and over again, right? I don't see any shot that looks like it had more than a few thousand in it. Why would they have needed a quarter of a million of them? And what did they do with them afterward?

I spend way too much of my life thinking about things like this. Let's go to the commercial…

This morning, the Washington Post editorial writers (presumably a gent named Fred Hiatt) authored an opinion piece that defends George W. Bush for his leaking of what had been classified data, and attacks Joe Wilson for his statements against Bush. Here is a link to the editorial in question.

Now, what's interesting about this is that the "facts" presented in support of the editorial's position are not only at variance with what has been reported elsewhere…they're even at variance with what's been reported in the Washington Post. Matter of fact, the editorial contradicts some facts presented in the very same issue of the Post. This article that was in the paper this morning is headlined, "A 'Concerted Effort' to Discredit Bush Critic" and they're referring to Wilson. But the editorial in the same issue is written as if it's an established truth that there was no such effort. (For more on the contradictions, read this.)

So here's my question: Is the Post editorial a case of its author saying, "I don't believe the other article?" Or is it, "I didn't read the other article?" There's a big difference there.

This is not unprecedented. A few years ago, The Wall Street Journal went through a period where the editorial page seemed to be written and assembled by folks who were unpersuaded by facts that appeared in The Wall Street Journal. In that case, it seemed clear that they thought the rest of the paper was getting things wrong. I'd like to know if that's what's occurring now with the Washington Post.

For a paper that still gets dismissed by some as a left-wing rag, the Post has been pretty supportive of George W. Bush. In fact, the American people have been a lot less supportive of Bush than the Post has been. At times, it's seemed like the paper has been consciously trying to side with him in order to shake the "Liberal" label and garner some respect (and subscriptions) from Conservatives. If that's their goal, it won't work. They could write 98 editorials praising the brilliance of Bush and two criticizing his policies, and the two would still be dismissed as Bush-hating, left-wing bias. For a lot of right-wingers, hurling that charge has becoming a way of sticking their fingers in their ears and going "la la la" so they don't have to hear, and therefore deal with facts that aren't going their way.

Big Laurel and Hardy fest tomorrow evening on Turner Classic Movies. At 8:00 (all times Eastern), they run Bonnie Scotland, followed by The Devil's Brother at 9:30. Bonnie Scotland is okay and The Devil's Brother is probably the best of the "period" pieces they did. At 11:15, we get Nothing But Trouble, which is one of their later, less-than-wonderful features so skip that one unless you're a completist.

At 2 AM, TCM is running three shorts in a row: The Music Box, Them Thar Hills and Tit for Tat. Of these, The Music Box is the gem. Them Thar Hills is a short that I always thought was among the weaker efforts of Stan and Ollie but it was apparently quite popular with audiences of the time. So they made Tit for Tat as something of a sequel, and it's also not among my favorites. But what comes next is.

At 3:30 AM — and remember, these are all Eastern times I'm giving you — TCM gives us Sons of the Desert, followed at 4:45 AM by Way Out West. These were probably the two best features Laurel and Hardy ever made

That's all from Turner Classic Movies (although they are running Room Service on Wednesday if you like medium-grade Marx Brothers films). However, Tuesday morning the Fox Movie Channel is airing The Big Noise, which is another of those later films when The Boys were showing their ages and when they missed the freedom and support of the Hal Roach Studios. It does have some wonderful moments, though. Nothing Laurel and Hardy ever did was without wonderful moments.

The polling conducted by Fox News currently has George W. Bush at 36% approval and 53% disapproval, while they have the Vice-President at 35% approval, 53% disapproval. Dick Cheney is now demanding that when he checks into a hotel room, all the television sets be tuned to The Cartoon Network.

Of all the animated clips I've seen posted to the 'net, this one's my favorite. Even better is that I agree with its message and that it was commissioned by and distributed by the folks at Consumer's Union, the people who bring you Consumer's Reports magazine.