Bill Maher's HBO show is on hiatus 'til August but they went out with a terrific "New Rules" segment on the last episode. You can read the whole thing here but let me just post a couple of paragraphs from the middle where it really began to get good…

New Rule: The people in America who are most in favor of the Iraq war must now go there and fight it. The Army missed its recruiting goal by 42% last month. More people joined the Michael Jackson Fan Club. "We've done picked all the low-lying Lynndie England fruit." And now we need warm bodies. We need warm bodies like Paula Abdul needs…warm bodies!

Now, I know you're thinking, but, Bill, I already do my part with the "Support Our Troops" magnet I have on my Chevy Tahoe. How much more can one man give? Well, here's an intriguing economic indicator. It's been over a year since they graduated, but neither of the Bush twins has been able to find work. Why don't they sign up? Do they hate America or just freedom in general?

I don't think this is as silly as some might have it. I knew a lot of people who were utterly gung-ho for the Vietnam War until it touched their lives in some way. Before a loved one was drafted, it was the duty of Young Americans to go and fight and maybe die over there. Once there was even the chance that one of those Young Americans might not be a total stranger — maybe even (gasp) a family member — the war was wrong, sending men to maybe die in it was wrong, et cetera, et cetera…

I could absolutely respect a consistent pro-Vietnam War position and at one time, I had one. At least, I was for that war long enough to march for it a couple of times. My position changed…oddly enough, around the time I knew I would not be drafted. Still, after that, I did not think ill of many who were advancing arguments in which I had lost faith. They believed what they believed, regardless of the personal sacrifice that might be involved, and to the extent that there are "good wars" in this world, they flow from that premise. The people I couldn't respect were the ones whose positions seemed to shift solely because they suddenly stood to lose something or someone. There was a lot of talk then about not having reverence for our troops and I felt that a dandy way to not do that was to view them not as real human beings but as expendable drones. The pro-war acquaintance with whom I argued the most after my conversion seemed to think winning that war was worth any amount of lives as long as they were poor, mostly minority, and he didn't know the fallen by name.

Polls suggest that somewhere between 57% and 54% of Americans do not think this war is worth fighting, versus 41% to 44% who think it is. I wonder what that latter number would be if we were to reinstate The Draft and arrange it so that it was a pure lottery with no exemptions, no deferments and no way for Americans to be certain that they or their family members wouldn't have to go. I'm guessing something close to single digits.

Two important articles over on Slate. Fred Kaplan tells of a recent U.S. military assault in Iraq where, he says, we did a lot more harm than good. And Jacob Weisberg discusses the Newsweek flap and the Pot/Kettle Factor.

A website called the Comics Foundry has a very good interview with Neal Adams. It's about being a comic book artist but much of what he says in it has relevance to almost anyone who's out there trying to build a career as any kind of creative talent. Here's a link to Part One and here's a link to Part Two.

Funny guy, that Frank Gorshin. The first time I saw him perform live was at a Bar Mitzvah reception for a classmate of mine. The classmate was a relative of a gent named Arthur Ellen who was a somewhat famous hypnotist of the day, performing on TV and asserting he could help people become what they wanted to be. Ellen got up at the event to put on a little demonstration and somehow — I never understood how or why — Frank Gorshin appeared on the little platform with him and preempted the hypnosis by doing about twenty minutes of impressions for the crowd: Kirk Douglas, Burt Lancaster, Marlon Brando, the works.

I subsequently heard Gorshin on some talk show say that he owed a large chunk of his career to Mr. Ellen's therapy, so I guess that was the connection. But one thing hypnosis didn't do for Frank Gorshin was to help him stop smoking. Every time I was around him, he was going from one cigarette to the next. Once at a comic book convention, we were chatting and Frank was smoking. A security guard came by and politely pointed out a No Smoking sign. Frank apologized as if he hadn't seen it, stubbed out the Marlboro and then, the second the guard was gone, out came the pack of cigarettes again. Without even pausing in conversation, maybe not even aware he was doing it, Gorshin lit up another. So I'm not all that surprised that Cause of Death is listed as lung cancer, emphysema and pneumonia. As I mentioned here, reporting on a luncheon where he was honored, everyone was urging him to quit and he said he was trying.

I enjoyed talking with Frank at comic conventions and even interviewing him once or twice in front of audiences. Naturally, everyone was asking him about playing The Riddler on the Batman TV show and some even asked him about the one episode of the original Star Trek in which he appeared. He was polite about it, in large part because he was selling autographed photos from those gigs. But he vastly preferred talking about the other 98% of his career. You could see him light up (as a performer and as a smoker) when, after answering the 93rd question about Batman, one of us would mention something where he didn't wear tights, especially his recent projects. I saw him twice playing Nathan Detroit in a touring company of Guys and Dolls with Jack Jones as Sky Masterson and Maureen McGovern as Adelaide. Apart from the fact that Nathan occasionally lapsed into a Dean Martin impression, Frank was very good…and very glad that I'd seen and praised his performance.

The core of his career was, of course, his stand-up act and I had the pleasure of seeing the whole thing once, and with a full orchestra behind him. It wasn't all impressions. He sang and he told stories and he even did a little dramatic moment — a monologue about an actor learning he's been fired and what it meant to his life. As a mimic, Gorshin had an uncanny way of getting inside Big Stars and capturing their essence, but that was only part of what he did.

My sympathies go out to his family and also to his close friend and agent, Fred Wostbrock, who took very good care of him. Gorshin's final performance will be broadcast on Thursday's episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigations but I'll bet you we see the man in reruns forever.

Brian Montopoli makes some important points about the current Newsweek scandal.

Frazetta: Painting With Fire is running many times this week on the Independent Film Channel. This is a documentary on the great painter of fantasy scenes and women with awesome rear ends. Here's what I wrote about it a year ago. If you haven't seen it and you get IFC, this would be a good opportunity.

Several folks have asked me to keep them posted of interesting folks who pop up on the old What's My Line? reruns on GSN. If you taped or TiVoed this morning's episode (i.e., the one running right this moment), you saw Jacques Cousteau and William Bendix. Tomorrow morning, we should have William Holden and the June Taylor Dancers. Friday morning, Claudette Colbert and director George Stevens are Mystery Guests. Then, jumping ahead past less exciting names, next Monday morning is an episode with Bishop Fulton J. Sheen and the two men who wrote My Fair Lady, Gigi and Camelot among other wonders, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe. If I forget, someone should remind me to mention again that next Thursday morning, May 26, there's an episode with Jerry Lewis (newly divorced from Dean) on the panel, and the Mystery Guest is Walt Disney.

Also: Next weekend's "classic" rerun of Saturday Night Live is the show from October 23, 1976 — a second season episode and the first time Steve Martin hosted. It's not a particularly memorable show, sketch-wise, nor is it helped a lot by musical guest Kinky Friedman. The best moments are to be found in a couple of stand-up spots by Mr. Martin that will remind you what he did well back when he did that kind of thing. Legend has it that Lorne Michaels had once resisted booking the guy because he thought his act was too silly…but Martin impressed all and was immediately invited back to host again. He returned to the post just nine shows later and made many memorable appearances thereafter.

The following weekend, the rerun is from May 22, 1982 — one of the Eddie Murphy/Joe Piscopo years — with guest host Olivia Newton-John. The highlight is probably a duet on "Ebony and Ivory" by Stevie Wonder (Murphy) and Frank Sinatra (Piscopo), and Graham Chapman makes a couple of brief, odd appearances in other sketches.

The classes sometimes seem a bit overpriced but there are some intriguing lecturers at The Learning Annex. If you're in the Los Angeles area and interested in getting into the writing of animated cartoons, my old buddy Jack Enyart (who's written a lot of them) is conducting a one night lesson on June 1. And on July 28, you can pay $40 to have Stan Lee teach you how to be Stan Lee.

Still under Ye Olde Deadline, I haven't the time to write much here today. But Matthew Yglesias pretty well sums up the way I view this whole Newsweek scandal. I'm afraid I'm not much impressed when people only get outraged over the mistakes of their political enemies and overlook similar (and more serious) screw-ups by their own side.

Turns out that what I identified as an R. Crumb self portrait over on Tom Spurgeon's site is actually a Crumb drawing of Allen Ginsberg. This is not quite as big an error as Newsweek just owned up to but I was wrong. On the other hand, I don't think it looks very much like any picture I've ever seen of Allen Ginsberg. Then again, the few times I've met Crumb, I was struck by how he looked nothing like the way he drew himself.

Just saw a paper copy of today's Los Angeles Times — yes, they still make them — and there's a different R. Crumb self-portrait accompanying Crumb's little op-ed piece. That is, it's different from the one on Tom Spurgeon's site.

You have to really be into obscure comic book credits to know the name of Al Kurzrok. He worked briefly for Marvel around 1970, mostly as a letterer but he also wrote a few stories for them, including five issues of Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, a couple of western stories and some other things that never saw print. He also worked for a time for Harvey Comics…and even I'm not all that sure what else, if anything, he did — though I know this obituary gets his comic book credits all wrong. Most interesting is that he left that world behind, went into Psychology and occasionally tapped into his old skills to advance his new career. (I found out about all this via Tom Spurgeon's fine news blog, The Comics Reporter. Tom also has up a drawing of R. Crumb which I guess is the drawing that goes with the L.A. Times article just mentioned.)

The L.A. Times website features a short editorial piece by Robert Crumb. [Subscription probably required.] I think the online piece is missing an illustration that presumably appears in the old-fashioned, paper Los Angeles Times.

Thanks to all who've written with concern about my mother and myself. She's better now but we spent another long night in the U.C.L.A. Medical Center Emergency Room…and by the way, the doctor part of the place is super-efficient but I've never seen unhealthier food than they have in their vending machines. Talk about drumming up business. You'd think a hospital would have trail mix and fruit and maybe a hard-boiled egg or two but no. It was all Ho-Hos and Ding-Dongs and a kind of cinnamon bun so noxious that at 4:30 in the A.M., I watched a famished lady buy a package, take one bite and then shot-put the rest into a dumpster across the room. The vending machines did have microwave popcorn and microwave oatmeal-in-a-cup but as the waiting room had no microwave oven, those didn't seem too healthy, either.

I'm way too far behind on work to write about all we've been through here. When I do, I'll expand on what I think I said earlier about how the doctors and nurses and paramedics have all been terrific but that the non-medical folks and the red tape in the system are insane. They keep making mistakes and then no one seems to have the power or responsibility to fix those mistakes. I'll tell you all about some of them once I finish a script that should have been done long ago. If I can just manage to get a couple more days without having to go to some medical facility and argue with people, it will be.

Here are a few dangling topics and follow-ups…

• Yes, I did receive a copy of Rowan Atkinson Live, thank you. Thirty of you offered copies and two just sent them, and I am grateful to you all. By the way, several said, "I bought this and I've never watched it." You should. It's hilarious.
• Another thirty or so of you sent suggestions of good dial-up Internet Service Providers. I'm trying AllVantage on a month-to-month basis and so far, all seems to be well. I'll let you know if it ever stops being well.
• The release date on the fourth volume of Garfield and Friends on DVD has been moved up to August 30. To answer an oft-emailed query, this is the one that includes the first episode with the Singing Ants ("Picnic Panic") and there are plenty of great guest star voices including Victoria Jackson, James Earl Jones, John Moschitta, Don Knotts, Don Messick, Stan Freberg, Buddy Hackett, Bill Kirchenbauer, Jewel Shepard, Dick Gautier, Paul Winchell, June Foray and Charles Aidman. There will be one more volume of DVDs after this and I have no idea when it'll be out…but it does look like we'll make it through all five volumes without any special features or commentary tracks or anything of the sort. Sorry…but it wasn't up to me.
• Yes, I know I still owe you the story about Marty Feldman I promised long ago.
• In this posting, I asked for someone to suggest an article that presented a different view of the Iraq War than the one to which I linked. Russ Maheras suggested this one and Buzz Dixon nominated this article. I'd like to suggest that everyone also read The Downing Street Memo, which would probably be Exhibit A in impeachment proceedings if a Democrat had taken us to war on these terms.

Lastly, I owe an awful lot of e-mails to an awful lot of people. If you're one of them, please be patient. I'm back on deadline for now so there won't be a lot of messages getting answered and there won't be a lot of stuff on this page for a while. All this will pass.

And here we see a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, which is an Internet tradition dating back to the fourth century. It means that the guy who runs the weblog is too swamped with personal matters (say, a not-well mother and a pressing script assignment) to update his website for a little while. But he wants those who visit his site to know that he's thinking of them and that he's not not posting because he's off hammocking and lounging about. He's just too busy to post for a little while. And you're supposed to understand.

The "suspect" in the police chase I mentioned earlier has died in the hospital. KABC (and I would guess, other local stations) are replaying the footage up to the moment when the officers opened fire on the guy. In a way, this is a disservice to viewers because the full video clearly showed that the man had a gun, and it would erase any suggestion that the police shot an unarmed man. I also don't think it is a bad thing to advertise the fact that if you have a run-in with police and you're holding a gun, you're quite likely to be shot. That's a lesson more people oughta learn.

We'll probably never know but I'd be fascinated to know what, if anything, a man is thinking in a situation like that. He has dozens of armed policemen after him and helicopters overhead. Does he actually think he can shoot his way out of that and get away? Or hold the police off with one handgun? Some people apparently provoke police shoot-outs as a form of suicide, and perhaps they have a hate on for the police and figure to take a few with them…but this fellow looked like he was really trying to get away. What, if anything, could have been on his mind?