If you ever lost money at the Desert Inn hotel in Las Vegas, you may enjoy seeing the final remnant of that venerable institution destroyed. Early this morning, the last remaining tower of one of the town's oldest casinos was imploded to make way for Steve Wynn's new hotel, which is supposed to open in 2005 at a cost of somewhere between two and three billion smackers. It will include 2,700 rooms, an 18-hole golf course, a performance theater that is costing $100 million just by itself, an art gallery full of Picassos and Van Goghs, eighteen restaurants and — correcting what has long been to me one of the great omissions of the hotels at which I've stayed — a Ferrari and Maserati dealership. I sure hope they have nickel slots and a $4.95 late night steak-and-eggs special.

Many intriguing nuggets of Vegas history were destroyed along with the rest of the place in this morning's razing. The Desert Inn was owned for a time by famed wacky billionaire Howard Hughes. In 1966, Hughes booked the top two floors of the place for ten days…and when the ten days were up, he declined to leave. The proprietors of the hotel wanted him out. Even though he was paying for his lodging, they were in the business of renting to gamblers who'd lose money in the casino, not to rich folks who stayed holed-up in their rooms. Hughes eventually solved the impasse by buying the whole Desert Inn for $14 million, which at the time was around double what the place seemed to be worth. (Next year, there will be individual paintings on the property that cost that much.) Eventually, Hughes purchased other Vegas hotels, including the Frontier — aka The New Frontier — right across the street.

At one point, Mr. Hughes decided he wanted to be able to go back and forth between the Desert Inn and the Frontier but — of course — he was not about to go out and cross Las Vegas Boulevard like any normal human being. So…at considerable expense, he had a tunnel built under the Strip, connecting his two establishments. It cost a couple million and apparently, Hughes never got around to using it himself. In fact, some say he never got around to setting foot in the Frontier or several of the other hotels he owned, like the Sands, the Landmark, the Silver Slipper and Castaways, all of which have since been levelled. But the Desert Inn-Frontier tunnel was used for a few years by employees of both establishments. Wayne Newton tells stories of how he would do his show at the Desert Inn and then, because the headliner at the Frontier was out sick, he'd dash over via the tunnel and fill in across the street.

In the seventies, someone decided that vibrations from the traffic above had dangerously weakened the tunnel structure so they closed it down. The bringdown of the Desert Inn probably seals off one side of it forever and any day now, when a deal is finally put in place to implode the Frontier, that will close it off from the other side. Before that happens, someone had better check to make sure Shecky Greene isn't down there.

You should be able to view this morning's implosion at this link. If not, go to the website for KLAS-TV and hunt around. [NOTE: The first link is to a pop-up window. So if you have something like a pop-up blocker, you may want to do whatever it takes to allow pop-ups before you click on it. In most programs, you hold down the CTRL key when you click the link and that overrides the blocker. And the video plays fine on my computer via Internet Explorer but doesn't seem to work in Foxfire, even though both are loading it into Windows Media Player. This is not my fault.]

As Robert Scheer points out: In the Bush administration, being wrong about Iraq does not get you fired. Being right does. [Los Angeles Times registration may be required.]

There have been poor copies of it around the Internet for years…but IFilm is now offering a better video clip of perhaps the greatest TV musical moment of the seventies. That's right…William Shatner performing his version of Elton John's "Rocket Man" on a 1978 awards show. This link may bring it up on your screen (it's an ASF file, playable through Windows Media Player). If that link doesn't work, go here and look around for it. This is the number that was so odd that Chris Elliott did a parody of it on David Letterman's show by just coming out and doing it exactly the same way Shatner did it.

I have a little problem I'd like to share with you, not that I expect anyone to be able to solve it…

Recently, I've received an amazing number of e-mails from strangers who are trying to contact someone…usually an individual in the animation business or the field of comics who they think I may know. In some cases, they say they are old friends. In some cases, they say they're looking to discuss some project with the person. Sometimes, they don't say. It's just, "I'm trying to get in contact with So-and-so. Please send me their e-mail address or phone number."

If I don't know the person they seek, it's fine. It takes 20 seconds to write a reply that says, "Sorry, I have no contact info for him (or her)." Unfortunately, I usually do have what they seek. I just feel I shouldn't be giving it out to strangers. I've chosen to put my e-mail address and contact info all over the Internet but most folks don't do that. (I just realized there's another category of these messages. It's when someone writes me something like, "Can you send me Peter David's e-mail address?" If that person went to Google and typed in "Peter David," they could have found it in less time than it takes to write to me. This probably bothers me more than it should.)

Sometimes, I have an e-mail address for the person so I forward the message to them. Most of the time though, the person is writing me because they're trying to reach someone who doesn't have e-mail. Some human beings don't, you know. I don't want to pass on a private phone number or address so I have several options, all of which require more time than I can afford to devote to this. At the moment, I have forty or fifty of these messages in a folder…and I'm not even answering all the mail that people write to me about me, lately.

Like I said, I'm not expecting anyone to tell me how to handle this. Just thought I'd vent and perhaps discourage more of these messages. Please, people. I'd like to help you get in touch with the person you seek but it's just getting to be too big a drain on me.

At above left is the cover to the historic Flash Comics #1 which featured the first Flash story, written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Harry Lampert. Today, many text-only obits are appearing about Harry (like this one and this one). In a day or two, they'll start appearing with pictures. Let's see how many run this cover — which was drawn by Sheldon Moldoff — as if it represents Harry's work. A couple are already forgetting that Harry was not the sole creator of the super-speedster; that it began with a script by Fox. And I just heard from a reporter who's writing about Harry but who apparently doesn't know that the Flash has undergone a few changes (like becoming a couple of totally different people) since 1940.

For the record, Lampert never drew a cover with The Flash on it. The cover to Flash #6, seen above right, is sometimes wrongly identified as his. It was actually by E. E. Hibbard, who took over the Flash strip as of the third issue. Comic book lore may not be as important as some history but it's not that difficult to get it right.

Michael Kinsley writes about judicial activism. [Washington Post registration may be necessary.]

I don't agree with every word of articles to which I link, and sometimes don't agree at all. But this one I think is right on the money: Decrying "judicial activism" is usually just a way of saying you think a judge should interpret a law, which may or may not say what you want it to say, as saying what you want it to say.

That's right: Another damn obit. The very funny comedian and voice actor Dayton Allen died last Thursday at age 85. Born Dayton Allen Bolke, he was a native of New York and he got into show business, more or less following the path of his boyhood friend, Art Carney. Both broke into radio in their teens as disc jockeys and specialists in funny voices. Dayton parlayed his skills into work on early children's TV shows, dubbing in voices for puppets and often appearing on camera. He did both for years on the Howdy Doody program, originating the voice of Flub-a-Dub and many other denizens of Doodyville and playing a wide array of non-puppet characters.

Steve Allen "discovered" Dayton and added him to his stock company of comic players. Often, when Steverino did his "Man on the Street" routines, the funniest interview would be with Dayton Allen playing some scatterminded "expert." Audiences howled at him and loved repeating his catch-phrase, "Whyyyyy not?"

Throughout all of this, Dayton Allen established himself as one of the top voiceover performers in the New York talent pool. He was heard in many of the Terrytoons animated shows, voicing both Heckle and Jeckle, and almost all the characters on the Deputy Dawg series, including the star of the show. He was also heard on many of the cartoons produced by Hal Seeger, such as Milton the Monster and Stuffy Durma. He occasionally worked with his brother, Bradley Bolke, who was also active in doing animation voices. (Bradley was the voice of Chumley the Walrus on Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.)

Dayton more or less retired from performing in the early eighties. Around then, I had occasion to offer him a role in a TV show I was writing and it led to what is easily the most hilarious hour or so I ever spent on the phone. Our casting director was unable to track down an agent for Mr. Allen so I called a friend who furnished me with what turned out to be Dayton's home number. I made the call to him and he politely declined the job, saying that thanks to wise real estate investments, he had plenty of money…and he didn't feel like flying to Los Angeles to be funny. He could be funny in his own toilet, he said. He was sure funny on the phone, and he seemed to enjoy the audience. He kept coming up with anecdotes and jokes, and he kept me on the line for so long that I felt like I should have paid a cover charge. Weak with laughter, I finally begged off…but only when he announced he had to go to the toilet and be funny in there. I'm sure he was…just as I'm sure it was our loss that he decided to retire when he did.

Just amended the Harry Lampert obit. I wrote that he died on his 88th birthday because the source I consulted said he was born November 13, 1916. Mike Catron, who diligently preserves convention panels and interviews for posterity on videotape, informs me Harry said at one he was born November 3, 1916. I'm assuming Harry was right. Thanks, Mike…for that and many other contributions.

Harry Lampert, the artistic co-creator of The Flash, died this morning at age 88. The cause was listed as a cerebral hemorrhage, but he had been in failing health for the past few months, battling cancer and undergoing treatments at a hospital near his home in Florida. A native of New York, Harry showed early artistic talent and by age sixteen was working at the Max Fleischer animation studio, primarily as an inker and clean-up artist for Popeye and Betty Boop cartoons. One day, he heard about a way to pick up extra money…drawing for these new things called "comic books." Harry begin moonlighting, and eventually working full-time for some of the earliest "shop" enterprises, thereby becoming one of the true pioneers of the field. He mostly drew "funny" comics but as the industry turned towards superheroes, he did a few of them, too. The most notable came in 1940 when editor Sheldon Mayer at the All-American company (later absorbed by DC) was assembling a new book called Flash Comics.

Mayer needed someone to draw the title character, a super-speedster devised by writer Gardner Fox. Lampert got the job but was not happy drawing in that style. Little suspecting it was the feature with which his name would be forever linked, he asked off after two stories and Mayer, who knew he had miscast Harry, happily replaced him. Lampert moved on to funnier features (including filler gag pages for many of the company's books) and later out of comic books and into magazine gag cartoons for, among many others, Saturday Review and The Saturday Evening Post. In the late forties, he segued into advertising work, where he enjoyed great success and eventually formed his own agency.

Cartooning was only one of his passions. Another was bridge, a game at which he became so expert that after retiring from cartooning in the mid-seventies, he wrote several books and a syndicated column on the topic. In the eighties, comic book fans tracked him down and he began appearing at conventions, selling newly-created sketches of The Flash. The last few years of his life, he bounced back and forth between bridge tournaments and comic-cons, happily signing autographs and marketing his wares at both. I enjoyed talking with the man and interviewing him on panels, and I'm sure glad we all got the chance to meet and know him.

E-mails are reminding me of another duo that went by the name of Tom and Jerry…the singing pair who later reverted to their real names of Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. They were "Tom and Jerry" for a couple years…and apparently, they even wrote most of their songs together then, whereas the later Simon & Garfunkel hits (the important ones, at least) were written wholly by Paul. Art was Tom and Paul was Jerry, in keeping with the obvious sense that, in any Tom and Jerry team, Tom has to be the taller of the two. They had ten or so modestly-received records, then broke up, in part because Paul decided he didn't want to be half of the new Everly Brothers. He wanted to be all of the new Elvis Presley, so he went off and recorded a song on his own. Thereafter, they recorded with others under an array of phony names before finally getting together again. Interesting that they didn't do anything all that memorable until they started being, more or less, themselves.

My pal Buzz Dixon informs me that the original, 19th century meaning of "Tom and Jerry" was to go drinking, brawling and carousing, and he directs my attention to this dictionary page on the subject.

It's hard to get on a political website this week without confronting the question of whether our recent presidential election was fixed. This is a shame because it largely overwhelms what is probably a more valid, fixable issue, which is whether our recent presidential election was run with all possible competence. It may well be that no one tried to rig the vote in any way but that there were still a lot of errors committed and undependable machines employed, and that the people responsible need to be slapped around a little and forced to correct things.

Unfortunately, Americans don't seem to get mad about the possibility that votes were lost or miscounted unless they think it caused their side to lose an election. After the mess of 2000, I can't recall a single prominent Republican expressing outrage that the machines yielded such arguable results, that voters were wrongly purged from the voting rolls, that ballots were confusing, etc. Some quietly urged a reform of the system, if only so that their side wouldn't get accused of cheating the next time…but there was no public outrage from the winners, and the losers were too busy charging fraud to deal with what may have been simple ineptness.

If principle trumped partisanship, both sides would have been equally incensed…and probably about errors, not rigging. Most of the improvements that were put in place seem to have been a matter of local officials knowing they could not defend their voting machines and procedures and not wishing to become "the next Florida." In some cases, it would seem they replaced old, unreliable systems with newer, unreliable systems…and that the appeal of paperless voting machines is not that they're easier to rig but that it's more difficult to prove if they're just plain wrong.

My hunch is that the recent election was not stolen but that there were an awful lot of irregularities that should not have occurred. My further hunch is that if angry Democrats were to shut up about the vote now, there would be a lot less impetus to fix those irregularities.

I know this was not likely but I kinda wish John Kerry's concession speech had instead said something like this…

It now appears that when all the ballots are counted, we will not have enough electoral votes to win the presidency…however, Senator Edwards and I have decided that it is not in the best interest of this country that we concede at this time. We have dozens of reports of questionable vote counts, of precincts that logged more votes than they have registered voters, and of provisional and absentee ballots that have not even been opened. Many of these are in states where they cannot possibly affect whether the state's electoral votes go to us or to the President…but that doesn't matter. Most of these are probably innocent, explainable errors…but that doesn't matter, either. Every American has the right to have his or her vote counted, and to have it counted accurately and given the same respect as any other vote.

We do not expect the result of this election to change but in the hope of changing how votes are recorded and counted in the future, we have decided not to concede until we are satisfied that every vote — whether it is for us, the President, Ralph Nader, Michael Badnarik or Daffy Duck — has been counted, and counted properly. If you are upset that this delays the resolution of this election, I'm sorry. Please direct your outrage to the people who are paid to count the votes accurately and, in some cases, have not done this.

There would have been howls of anger and charges of "sore loser," I'm sure. But I think most of America would have respected it, and it might have done some good. In this day and time, there's no excuse for a vote count the losers can't accept just as readily as the winners.

You all know Tom and Jerry, the cat and mouse from M.G.M. cartoons. If you are a true animation buff, you also know Tom and Jerry, the tall-and-short pair that appeared in Van Beuren cartoons before them. This new website tells you all about the human duo, whose cartoons I remember well from my early television viewing. Sheriff John ran them, over and over, on his Lunch Brigade cartoon show on KTTV, Channel 11 here in Los Angeles. After the feline/rodent characters named Tom and Jerry became famous, the old Van Beuren shorts were retitled "Dick and Larry"…but I am certain that the ones Sheriff John ran were still named "Tom and Jerry."

In fact, I recall wondering how the cat and mouse in my Tom and Jerry comic books and in the cartoons over on Channel 13 could have the same names as the two guys on Sheriff John's show. Around this time at a restaurant, I heard an adult order a "Tom and Jerry" from the bar and I wondered if the drink was named after the human Tom and Jerry or the animal Tom and Jerry. When you're a kid, the world can be so mysterious.

The Washington Post has set up a searchable web page with info and, where available, photos of all the soldiers who've died in the Iraq conflict. A sad reminder of just some of what this is costing us.

As we all know, NBC runs an old episode of Saturday Night Live very early Sunday morning each week…and they run the full 90-minute versions of them, not the 60-minute cutdowns that are more often available. Lately, they've been jumping around the Eddie Murphy years, running some shows that haven't been seen — at least in their entirety — for a very long time. This coming weekend, the schedule says they're airing the episode from December 11, 1982. Once in a while, they inexplicably don't air what they've announced but if they do, you'll get to see a show from Season 8 hosted by Mr. Murphy and featuring musical guest Lionel Richie and a comedy-magic routine by Harry Anderson.

Season #8 was one of those years where they might as well have called the show, Eddie Murphy and Friends. He was easily the most popular cast member and the rest often didn't have a lot to do. On the episode allegedly airing this weekend, he became the first (and to date, only) member of the cast to host while still a member of the cast. Nick Nolte was supposed to do it that week but a few days before the broadcast, he cancelled, claiming illness. So Murphy got to function as host. It is said that most of the other cast members resented one of their own being singled out that way, and they especially objected when Murphy referred to the program, on-air, as The Eddie Murphy Show. It was…but that was kind of rubbing it in. Some folks think that, in the goodnights, you can see the other cast members registering their annoyance over the whole thing.

By the way: If they air this particular show and if you watch, stay 'til the end. Just before the goodnights, there's a pretty funny surprise guest cameo.

I didn't follow the Scott Peterson case. I didn't see what there was about it that warranted more attention than your average homicide. The O.J. Simpson matter involved a movie and sports star, some other peripheral celebrities, racial tensions, a couple of well-publicized public spectacles, colorful lawyers, some pretty serious charges of incompetence and/or treachery by the L.A. Police Department, and a murder case scenario that was chock full of fun stuff to study and discuss. The Peterson case seems to have had nothing of the sort. As far as I can tell, there wasn't even a good, solid controversy as to his guilt or innocence.

A crowd outside the courtroom cheered when the verdict was read. I'm wondering just what they were cheering for. One presumes they were all pretty certain that Peterson was guilty…so were they cheering because a guilty man was found guilty? I hate to think it's come to that in this country; that it's a cause for celebration when the system works the way it's supposed to work.

On CNN, I just saw a "legal analyst" say that the next task for the Defense is to convince the court that Peterson isn't so terrible that he warrants the death penalty. In other words: Yes, he plotted and committed the murder of his wife and unborn child…but it could have been worse. I don't think I'm going to follow that phase of the trial, either.