Is your computer screen dirty? Here…let a cute cat clean it for you.

Barring something unforeseen and time-sensitive (which probably means someone dying), I will not be posting much here for the next day or three. I'm devoting my attention to a deadline and all the things I must get done before next weekend's WonderCon in San Francisco. Which reminds me: It's about time I posted this banner again. See you on a more regular basis in a few days.

That's a car that my Uncle Aaron owned in the fifties. This is the same Uncle Aaron who I mentioned in this article. Throughout the fifties, he often shot 8mm movies on two subjects. One was his travels around the world, which were extensive. The other was his favorite nephew, which was me. When he died around '62, custody of his film collection passed to me, and this included a Bell-and-Howell projector that was an antique even then. I watched a few of the movies but when you're ten, it's no big deal seeing yourself at age five. For the most part, the films stayed in a metal box in my closet, and when I moved out of my parents' home, I took them along and stashed them in a different closet.

Since I moved into my current home in 1981, they've been in — guess where? — the closet…and even if I'd been seized by some crazy urge to view them, I've had no way to do this. Uncle Aaron's projector expired a few years after he did, and its replacement, which I bought to run my Castle Films didn't survive the seventies. Every so often though, I'd notice the film box there and think, "Gee, I'd better get those things transferred to video before they rot."

Last week, I did. In the past here, I've plugged my pal, Stuart Shostak and his company, Shokus Video. He has a fine catalog of vintage TV programs that he sells on VHS and DVD, and you'd do well to browse his site and order many. But when I asked him who did good 8mm-to-DVD transfers, he replied that he did…and darned if he wasn't right. Practically overnight, he put about 150 minutes of cinema verite, Uncle Aaron style, onto DVD-R discs, and I couldn't be happier with the service or the quality. It came out a lot better than I'd dared expect.

The movies did not even begin to rot. There are plenty of things wrong with them — bad splices, scenes that are too dark, scratchy images, etc. — but I'm pretty sure all of that was wrong with them back in 1958, which is roughly the date of the last one we transferred. (I have more of Uncle Aaron's shaky cinematography, plus I have the dopey monster movies that I later made in my backyard with my friends and my uncle's camera, but I haven't gotten to them yet.)

Many of the problems, I can easily fix with Pinnacle Studio 9, which is my video-editing software of choice…though I made the decision not to "modernize" the footage with wipes or dissolves or anything of the sort. I'm just going to take out the black frames and messy splices, and try lightening the scenes of me getting my first bath. (I have a look on my face like, "Hey, get that camera outta here! Can't you see I'm naked?") I did a little tweaking the other night and it's amazing how, right here on my PC, I can correct bad edits and wrong exposure settings from 1953. I also did a frame-grab to create the above shot of Uncle Aaron's automobile.

Soon, I will have whittled the footage down to just what I want to keep. I don't really need an hour of my Aunt Dot posing with Russian peasants and waving in front of Buckingham Palace. I do need, or at least do want all that footage of me at various ages, if only to note one interesting progression. In the first reel of me, I'm being carried around since I can't walk. In the second, I'm crawling. In the third and fourth, I'm walking much the way I do now, only falling down every eight steps. In the fifth and sixth, I'm mostly dancing — probably the last time I danced, and you can see why.

As I watch it, I can still hear Uncle Aaron yelling, "These are motion pictures! Move around! Do something!" And then in the last reel, I'm doing feeble attempts at physical comedy — pratfalls, bad mime, and performing with my beloved Jerry Mahoney ventriloquist dummy. (You can actually see me doing a bad job of not moving my lips when Jerry's "talking." It had apparently not occurred to me at the time that providing his voice was not necessary for a silent film.) It all makes for a nice chronicle of my personal mobility. In a decade or two, when I'm much older and can't walk, I may edit in shots of me being carried around, just to complete the cycle.

But enough about this. Reading about someone else's home movies is only slightly less boring than being forced to watch them. I just wanted to share with you the amazing experience of getting these things onto DVD, and seeing not only myself but all those now-deceased friends and relatives. Boy, my parents were a handsome couple…and I'd forgotten how much Uncle Aaron, who occasionally let someone else take the movies so he could be in them, looked like Art Carney. If you have a box of old 8mm films in your closet, you might want to haul them out and get someone like Stuart to transfer them for you. Better still, get Stuart. Thanks to him, I have proof that I was once cute. Or, at least, cuter.

One interesting point to make about this whole scandal involving "Jeff Gannon" (or whatever his name is), the "reporter" who somehow obtained White House press credentials…

All defenses of this situation start with the premise that the news website he represented, Talon News, was a major source of news with a wide readership. They claim 700,000 users. But according to Alexa, which is the most notable service which tracks such things, Talon News ranks #640,377 in web traffic. That is, there are that many web sites that receive more hits.

By way of comparison, the site you're reading at the moment is composed of two separate web addresses. My weblog page (www.newsfromme.com) ranks #104,130, and the rest of the site (www.POVonline.com) ranks #226,035. Maybe I can get clearance to go in and participate in presidential press conferences. I'll start by asking Bush about his favorite delicatessen.

The photo I just posted of Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick was taken, I think, at the taping of the post-9/11 commercial for the Broadway community. Only a few days after the disaster, someone managed — in less time than seems humanly possible — to put together an ad spot that was shot in Times Square, featuring everyone who was then currently in a Broadway show, all singing "New York, New York." Does anyone have or know where I can find a tape or DVD or downloadable video of this spot? I thought it was just extraordinary.

Trio used to run a little three minute (or so) version of it between shows, and it included the pre-record of the voice track, and showed all the people turning out on the morning of the taping, and I thought it was wonderfully inspirational. I don't know what it did for the New York theater industry — how fast it helped business come back — but it sure made me feel good to see all those people pulling together, accomplishing something that must have been a nightmare of logistics.

I had it on the end of a show that I kept for months on my TiVo, and I kept showing it to visitors and saying, "Gee, I've got to dub that off before I forget and delete the recording that it's a part of." And then…guess what. Anyway, if anyone has it, I'd love to have the whole spot as they ran it on Trio but I'll settle for just the final, 30 second finished product. (Actually, like so many of us, I'll settle for whatever I can get…)

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick have confirmed plans to star in a Broadway revival of Neil Simon's The Odd Couple. It will commence in October and probably play to packed houses for however long the two of them feel like doing it.

Before you ask: Lane is playing Oscar and Broderick is playing Felix, and I have a hunch (based on absolutely nothing) that at some point, they'll try switching off for a week or so. Back when Walter Matthau was Oscar and Art Carney was Felix, they never did…though it became an Urban Legend of the theater, with people swearing they saw a performance where that happened. The rumor was apparently urged on by Matthau, who liked to put people on, telling them it had happened.

None of the press releases mention it but this will not be Mr. Lane's first time as Oscar Madison, the slovenly sports writer. A few years ago, he did it for a staged reading that is available on audio cassette. Here's the link to it but I'm not necessarily recommending you do. I did, because I love the play even if I've experienced it once too often, and this version featured a batch of my favorite actors. Nathan Lane alone was reason enough for me, but you also had David Paymer as Felix, Dan Castellaneta as Murray the Cop, Linda Purl and Yeardley Smith as the coo-coo Pigeon Sisters, and others. Great play, great cast…didn't work for me. Part of it was the fact that it was audio-only. Part of it was that I've just plain seen the play too often. And part of it was that the material, as recorded, had an odd disconnect of audience laughter and things that deserved to be laughed at. It was like a real good show having an "off" night…though of course, nothing those people do could be without interest.

I don't know how the new Lane/Broderick version will be but I do know it won't matter. That thing will sell out in a jif. And then, a year or two later, they'll probably come back — with one of them in drag — and do Barefoot in the Park.

Buzz Dixon directed me to this neat site that's all about names. They have a Java program over there — it should work on most but not all computers — that displays charts of the popularity of the 1000 most common first names. You can enter "George" and watch how it's declined in popularity or enter "Jason" and watch a big spike in the seventies and so on. I didn't particularly notice trends linked to the fame or infamy of specific prominent celebs, but I suppose there's some of that in there.

Thinking of buying something that comes with a money-saving rebate? You might want to read this before you do.

Actually, it's not a new weblog at all. Three items ago, I thanked Frank San Filippo for pointing the way to an interesting site. What I should have done was also point you to Frank's blog. He just posted this comment on the percolating scandal about the phony reporter who seems to have been planted in the White House press corps to lob softball questions at Bush and his press secretary. I am not as sure as Frank that the Democrats haven't done things that were equally underhanded…and feel that if they haven't, they will. Still, I think this "whatever it takes" mentality is very bad for the country. It distresses me when either party is quick to condemn wrongdoing by their opponents but quicker to excuse or overlook an absence of ethics on their team.

The fine cartoonist, Don Simpson, is now blogging, which is both good news and bad. The good news is that he has some interesting perceptions on his vocation. The bad news is that when he's putting them up on the web, he isn't drawing.

Jane Mayer on the use of torture in the current war. Among her conclusions is that it's wrong, that we know it's wrong so we outsource a lot of it to keep our hands clean…and that it rarely yields the kind of information that it's supposed to extract.

Here's a website that offers a bit of circumstantial evidence that William Rehnquist — the gent who's now Chief Justice of the Supreme Court — was Deep Throat. It's an intriguing possibility that would add to the pile of contradictions about Rehnquist's personal ethics and views, but I'm far from convinced. On the other hand, of all the guesses that involve people who are known for anything other than being Deep Throat suspects, it's the least far-fetched. [Thanks to Frank San Filippo for the pointer.]

In my book, Wertham Was Right — which you can order here, he tried to mention unobtrusively — I wrote an essay about Dr. Fredric Wertham. Back in the fifties, he was the main purveyor of the theory that the comic books then being published spawned juvenile delinquency and should be…well, it's not clear what action he wanted to see happen. He said kids should not be allowed to read comic books and that the publishers should clean up their contents, but he also said that he was adamantly against censorship. Apparently, he was in favor of comic books just so long as their intended audience didn't read them. Eventually, we had the Comics Code, which tidily laundered the content of comics and got rid of most of what Wertham didn't like and, of course, kids everywhere stopped misbehaving and having social adjustment problems.

Wertham was widely mocked for supposedly claiming that Batman and Robin were gay but that's not exactly what he said. He said their lifestyle was "…like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together." Which, of course, it is — though Doc Wertham was among the very few readers who thought of it that way. But you know how these things go: Once the rumors start, they gain momentum. There are times in the comics when one can almost sense that the writer is having a little fun with that insinuation. In Wertham Was Right, which was called that as an attention-getting joke but also because I thought he occasionally was, I wrote the following…

In one issue of Justice League of America in the sixties, the heroes discover they have contracted a cosmic plague that will doom everyone they've recently touched. Green Lantern shudders to think that he has infected his eternal fiancée, Carol Ferris. The Flash realizes he has doomed his beloved, Iris West. Even the Atom thinks about the fate that will befall the woman in his life, Jean Loring…

Batman, meanwhile, thinks: "Robin…what have I done to you?"

Since my book came out, I have sometimes been accosted by someone who doubts this and thinks it's a scene that exists not in my comics but in my imagination. So the other day, when someone sent me a JPEG of the panel in question, I figured I oughta post it here. This is from Justice League of America #44, published in 1966…

There it is — written by Gardner Fox, drawn by Mike Sekowsky, with inks by Joe Giella and Frank Giacoia. I have to believe Fox was chuckling when he wrote it and, knowing Mike, he probably had to be restrained from drawing Batman playing Judy Garland records with a limp wrist.

Frank Rich on those who would see the current movie, Million Dollar Baby, as a political statement.

Ray Arthur writes…

Has Haig been discounted for practical reasons or just because Woodward, et al, said he was not? My thinking is, if Bernstein had talked too much, which he is wont to do, and Haig was D.T., they would have to lie and deny in order to protect the General. Has anyone checked Al's pulse lately?

Alexander Haig was a suspect as Deep Throat for a number of reasons, one being that he was in the perfect position to know everything. During the Watergate investigation, he went from working under Henry Kissinger to being Nixon's Chief of Staff, and he was never viewed as one of those Nixon folks who thought all reporters were evil. Moreover, the Woodward-Bernstein book, The Final Days, pretty much makes Haig out as a hero who is more interested in the well-being of the nation than in serving Nixon, and he was obviously a major source for the book.

So that suggests a close connection to the authors, and perhaps the sense that they were rewarding him for past favors. Against this, there's the fact that he seems to have been out of town on the date of at least one reported Woodward-Throat meeting. (He was travelling with Kissinger, which presumably would also eliminate Henry as a suspect. I always thought Kissinger was the real longshot surprise to be Deep Throat, but there are those who've offered to bet their homes on it…this, even though Kissinger is a lifelong non-smoker, and we all know Deep Throat liked a cigarette with his Scotch.)

Haig was so bothered by reports that he was D.T. that he not only denied it, he persuaded Woodward and Bernstein to confirm his denial. For a long period, that was the only person they'd ever said was definitely not Deep Throat. At the time, Haig seemed to be a candidate — perhaps a longshot, but he wasn't about to admit it — for the presidency, which might explain why he was so insistent on not having folks think he was Deep Throat. Some might cheer the guy as a hero, but there are still folks high in the Republican party who wouldn't have that opinion.

I think the Woodward-Bernstein denial may be enough to cross Haig off the list. They didn't have to give him the absolution he requested, and they've always known that when the day came that Throat's identity would be revealed, they'd be coping with detractors who'd say it was a lie, there was no Deep Throat. So if I were Woodward and Bernstein, I sure wouldn't want to be on record as firmly denying by name that my source was my source.

There's even footage of Bob Woodward saying, "Al Haig was absolutely not Deep Throat," which would doubtlessly resurface. I don't know if journalistic ethics say that you can lie like that to protect a source, and certainly there have lately been reporters who have absolutely lied in denying sources. But in this case, it seems like it would have been a foolish thing for Woodward and Bernstein to do, and neither of those gents has ever struck me as foolish, especially with regard to protecting their own reps.

Again, though, this is a case where some of us could be assuming way too much.