Frank Rich discusses the rapidity with which the Abu Ghraib prison torture story has disappeared from public attention.

The other day in this item, I pointed you all towards an unusual item being sold over on the Costco website. The link no longer works so I'm now getting e-mails from folks asking what the hell it was I wanted you to see there.

They were selling an original Picasso crayon sketch…and not a very good one. It was priced at $39,999.99 because, after all, who'd pay $40,000 for something like that?

I find two things especially amusing about this, one being that the Costco site is set up for multiple quantities. You not only could order the original Picasso sketch online, you could have specified that you wanted two or ten or fifty of them added to your shopping cart.

And the second thing is to wonder about the route by which a Picasso sketch winds up being sold by Costco. I mean, if I had one and I wanted to sell it, I don't think it would occur to me to say, "Hey, how about that store where I bought that case of toilet paper?" Or imagine it from Costco's point-of-view. They have buyers who sit there all day and the phone rings and they say, "You have how many truckloads of Arm & Hammer Baking Soda? Okay, if you can come up with another 200,000 units and make delivery by August 1, it's a deal." Then the guy gets another call and he says, "What? Original Picasso sketch? No, we aren't overstocked with them. Hmm…how many thousand units you got of them? Oh, you just have the one sketch? Well, we don't usually deal in…oh, what the hell. Sure, we'll sell that. Maybe we can work up some sort of package deal…you know, shrink-wrap it with ten pounds of Cascade Dishwashing Detergent…"

Sounds silly, I guess. But the Picasso is no longer on the Costco site so I guess they sold it. Let me know if you see any Chagalls over there…or maybe a closeout on Matisses. Also, I'm just about out of Windex.

As noted in the previous item, Stan Lee has won the first scuffle in a lawsuit against Marvel Comics over profits relating to the Spider-Man movies. A couple of folks have written to ask what, if anything, this means for Spider-Man's co-creator, Steve Ditko. I'm not a lawyer nor do I play one on TV, but I'm pretty sure the answer is "Nothing," apart from some possible resentment. Stan's lawsuit, as I understand it, had nothing really to do with his status as co-creator of the character. He was not claiming ownership of the web-headed one or claiming that as co-creator he was entitled to anything…so there's no precedent here which could affect Ditko.

Stan's claim was a pretty simple contractual matter flowing from his employment deals with Marvel. His attorneys were claiming that one of those contracts stipulated he would receive certain sums of cash, if and when these movies were made. They sued, claiming he had not received the specified payments. If I read Marvel's response correctly, they're prepared to appeal based on some different interpretations of how the profits are to be calculated and which exploitations of the property are subject to Stan's cut. In other words, they're going to drag it out and argue every semi-colon, hoping Lee will see the wisdom of settling for a lesser sum. One suspects that no matter how things go, Smilin' Stan will be smilin' all the way to the Automated Teller.

And like I said, none of this relates to Mr. Ditko in any way. The dispute is about a specific contract Stan had as an executive of the company, and Ditko never had such a contract. In a just and benevolent world, the company would long since have loaded all their key creators down with hefty pensions and cash awards…but we rarely dwell in such a universe. I'm not saying it's right because, obviously, I don't think it is right. Alas, so many things are not.

Stan Lee has won Round One of his lawsuit against Marvel Comics over profits from the Spider-Man movie. Here's a report on the fisticuffs, which will continue with appeals.

Our Defense Department has issued a strong denial of the charges in the Seymour Hersh article I linked to yesterday. Here it is. I dunno which one to believe but I sure hope it's the Defense boys.

In the wee small hours of this morning, I made a telephonic appearance on Ken Gale's fine New York radio show, 'Nuff Said. I talked about Will Eisner with Ken and his co-host, Mercy Van Vlack, and we said wonderful things about the late Mr. Eisner.

At one point, I was talking about how the comic art community has reacted to his passing and I said something like, "The only person I know who isn't depressed at the news is a guy who's hoping that it will free up a hotel room for the San Diego Con."

This morning, I got up and found an e-mail from someone that included the sentence, "I have a hunch you were just making a joke but really, if this means that there is a hotel room available, who would I contact about it?"

Here's an interview with Paul Krugman in which he explains why there is no Social Security crisis.

Seymour Hersh writes that the Bush administration is quietly planning to get us into wars on beyond Iraq. Hersh has been wrong, or at least has seemed wrong, about a number of stories in the past. But he's also been right about an awful lot of things of this nature, and I'm worried he's right about this.

Congrats to Paul Ryan, one of the best comic artists working today, on his new gig. He's drawing the Phantom daily newspaper strip and his work begins appearing January 31. Good choice.

113 years ago today, a lad named Norvell Hardy was born in Harlem, Georgia. Somewhere around 1910, he began managing a "moving picture" theater and came to the conclusion that he could be as good (or bad) as any of the so-called comedians in the films he ran. By 1913, he was in Jacksonville, Florida where he began making films for the Lubin Company, billed as "Babe" Hardy. The nickname came from an effeminate barber who cut all the actors' hair and was known to rub powder into Hardy's many chins and call him a "nice baby." Years later, when Hardy's father Oliver passed away, he adopted that given name…but off-stage, he was "Babe" to everyone. By that point, he was out in Hollywood, where he'd become one of the busiest actors around. This was not surprising. He was capable of playing comedy or drama, though usually he played the "heavy" (bad guy) in whatever he did.

Oliver Norvell Hardy, it turned out, had a near-perfect, instinctual grasp of how to play to the camera. At the time, film acting was still a new skill, unmastered by most. Those with stage experience tended to go too broad with their gestures, as if they were still doing it for folks in the second balcony. Most of those without stage experience simply couldn't act at all. Hardy sensed how to split the difference, making him among the most effective screen performers. He was one of the first screen comedians to just be funny, regardless of the gag.

He appeared in hundreds of films, to the point where today's historians admit they'll probably never identify them all. As his longtime employer Hal Roach once said, "People just liked working with Babe Hardy. He was always great in front of the camera but he was also always a delight to be around when he wasn't in front of the camera." It was at Roach's studio that someone got the bright idea of pairing the chubby Hardy up with a skinny English comedian. That seems to have worked out well.

Next time I'm at Costco, I have to remember to pick up a crate of canned soup, a 24-roll package of paper towels, a ten-year supply of soy sauce, fifty jars of pickle relish…and a dozen of these.

Peter Dizekes offers up a list of 34 scandals in and around the Bush Administration. This is a Salon article so if you're not a subscriber, you may need to watch a commercial.

Roger Lowenstein offers up a long but fairly compelling argument that there is no Social Security crisis. There's apparently a long history of forecasting that the fund will be bankrupt by ever-advancing dates.

If you want to know why the TiVo company is in trouble, read this and this and if you're really interested, this. They all add up to a pretty simple fact: TiVo is being outflanked right and left in the field it pioneered. They simply have been unable to upgrade their product fast enough, and the current marketplace features many machines that are more attractive to buyers. (They are, however, finally rolling out TiVo to Go. Here's an article about that.)

But do not panic, fellow TiVo Travellers. Our machines still work. They just might not work as well as some alternatives. And yes, I know that's not the most comforting feeling in the world, especially since I felt it once before. It was about the time the shelves of VHS movies for sale at Tower Video became larger and the shelves for us Betamax users became smaller.

Here's a pretty good newspaper article about Will Eisner. It's written by my longtime buddy, Gary Brown…a reporter who really knows the comic book business. And I'm not just saying that because he often quotes me. I'm saying it because he always quotes me.

Also: Another old pal, Ken Gale, is devoting the next broadcast of his radio show, 'Nuff Said, to Eisner. It can be heard in the New York area and some nearby states, this coming Tuesday night (actually, Wednesday morning) from 3:30 AM to 6:00 AM, Eastern time. Over at the show's website, you can learn where to hear it on your radio or how to get it on the Internet. I'll be a guest (via phone) early in the proceedings.