Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in "Spin Alley" after the third Bush-Kerry debate…a segment shown tonight on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I think they should forget about having Conan replace Jay and just give the job to Triumph.

Someone will probably post a clip online. If you see one before I do, let me know so I can give the link.

You can now get my buddy Leonard Maltin's indispensable Movie Guide on your Palmtop or Pocket PC Computer. Go here to do this.

If you're interested in seeing old episodes of Saturday Night Live that haven't been rerun to death, you'll want to set your TiVo or VCR next week. Very late Saturday night (aka very early Sunday morning), NBC is rerunning in full the 12/12/81 episode hosted by Bill Murray. This is from the season where Eddie Murphy blossomed, though I recall this particular show being dominated by Joe Piscopo and Father Guido Sarducci. I also recall it not being very good.

There's a bit of history in that episode, which was from the show's seventh season. The first five were the ones Lorne Michaels produced with the original cast, more or less. Most of the sixth was produced by Jean Doumanian and that year was generally regarded as a grand disaster. Late in that season, Doumanian was fired and Dick Ebersol was brought in to turn things around. One of the things he did was to re-hire Michael O'Donoghue as the show's creative center. "Mr. Mike" had been an influential writer during the first Michaels era but this turn of duty was contentious and unhappy. O'Donoghue, the story goes, kept writing and lobbying for bits that could never get past Standards and Practices…and in the opinion of those around him, weren't worth fighting for. In this episode, he contributed to the writing of a skit called "At Home with the Psychos" about a mutant family living near a nuclear facility. The sketch did air but without one prop that the art department whipped up under O'Donoghue's direction. It was a "blowhole" (like that of a whale) that one of the Psychos was to wear…but it looked too much like a vagina. Even others on the show's crew got fed up with O'Donoghue's attempts to get the silly thing on the air.

The final straw came a few days later when Ebersol held a post-mortem meeting with the cast to discuss what all agreed was a weak episode. O'Donoghue (the story goes) burst into the room and began insulting everyone, telling the cast members they were devoid of talent. Shortly after that, he was fired and that was the end of Michael O'Donoghue's involvement with Saturday Night Live.

Meanwhile, all next week, the E! Channel, which has mostly been running episodes of SNL from the Will Ferrell years goes back through the nineties for most of the Halloween episodes. These include a few episodes that Comedy Central rarely, if ever, reran when they had the package.

This checklist by the Knight-Ridder news agency lists 178 campaign promises made four years ago by George W. Bush. Despite his party's control of Congress for most of that period, they estimate he has kept 46% of these promises. By contrast, Bill Clinton — though saddled with an opposition Congress — achieved about 66% of his campaign pledges. Obviously, these cannot be exact comparisons since some goals are harder to realize than others and since 9/11 did alter a lot of priorities in Washington. Still, I was surprised at how many of Bush's own proposals never made it through the House and Senate.

Frank Rich discusses the fuss over Kerry mentioning that Dick Cheney's daughter is a Lesbian…and Rich somehow manages to tie it in to the current embarrassments being visited upon Bill O'Reilly.

ABC has dropped their option to air the Miss America contest, dealing a severe blow to the pageant's pocketbook and prestige. Barring some major renovation that brings in Johnny Carson to host and has the contestants compete nude, I can't imagine any of the other networks picking up this brontosaurus. The pageant operators will probably put together a syndication arrangement whereby companies that participate in Miss America promotions sponsor the event, and that could allow the hoary institution to continue for quite some time without going topless.

Still, I think it says something nice about our national sensibility that the public has rejected this silly event with its shallow values and blatant commercialization. True, the Tony Awards get low ratings but they have a prestige that the beauty contest lacks. Does any little girl these days dream of growing up to be Miss America? A few boys, maybe…but no girls.

Here's a QuickTime excerpt from Monday's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in which Mr. Stewart summarizes his view of what occurred the previous Friday on Crossfire.

Lately, fewer of my e-mail correspondents are interested in selling me drugs and more want to loan me money. Here's an e-mail that just now arrived, somehow making it past my intricate series of Spam filters…

Here is Buford Craft. I write to you because we are accepting your mortgage application. Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loán for a $252.00 per month payment. Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website.

Now, there is zero chance I will ever order drugs from a stranger on the Internet. I don't really need any drugs but if and when I do, I'll get them from a slightly more reputable source…say, buying them from that guy who came up to me the other night in a parking lot and asked if I wanted to score some "dynamite crack."

And I don't need to borrow any money, thank you, but if and when I ever do, it won't be over the Internet…and it especially won't be from someone who calls himself "Buford Craft." Where, I wondered, did the presumably-overseas person who composed this message pick up that name? I mean, the guy was clever enough to insert an accented letter "a" into the word "loan" so no Spam filter would flag it. Couldn't he figure out that Buford Craft was not a name that would suggest a stable, reliable business associate? I wouldn't buy live bait from someone named Buford Craft.

So I googled Buford Craft…and don't waste your time. All you'll find is that someone by that name was a pallbearer at a funeral in 1970, and the obit is posted on the web. I'm guessing the loan shark just scours the Internet at random for proper names and plugs them into these inviting e-mails. Perhaps an automated bot does it, the same way it scans for domain names and e-mail addresses.

But the nice part is that whoever transmitted this e-mail wasted his time — and not just because almost none of us will fall for this racket. Most of these things, I'm told, are sent out by people and programmers who work on commission. If they somehow manage to snag a sucker and deliver them into the main scammers' clutches, the e-mailer (Buford, in this case) gets a fee or a cut. Just to see what would happen, I clicked on the link that was included to take me to the website where I was to fill out the form…and got a dead end. No website there. They probably either fled or were closed down. You can't trust anyone these days.

Today on the news, I saw George W. Bush saying over and over that he will never allow a new military draft. I usually think Bush believes what he says even when I think he's dead wrong. In this case, he didn't convince me he wasn't thinking, in the back of his mind, "If and when we need more soldiers, we'll find some way to draft them without calling it a 'draft.'"

Actually, I would have believed him if he'd said, "No one running for president can swear to you that a draft will never be necessary because no one can anticipate what battles America may have to fight." I think that would have been an honest statement. I also would have believed Bush if he'd come out with some explanation of how, apart from a draft, this country can increase the size of its army. The most likely answer, however, is something Bush probably wouldn't want to say because it's what Conservatives always accuse Liberals of doing: Throwing money at a problem.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to make military service more financially attractive. We say we love our soldiers but we don't seem to pay them very well. Earlier this year, I wrote this post all about this.

I also heard Bush say that Kerry will say anything to be elected. This was just before he said, "If you vote for me, I'll buy you a pony."

As you may have heard, there was a sudden change in the London company of The Producers, which is about to open. Richard Dreyfuss was going make his musical comedy debut in the lead role of Max Bialystock. Just the other day, citing medical problems, Dreyfuss pulled out and he's been replaced, only days before opening, by Nathan Lane…who at least knows the part. So a show that's about a show where the leading man is injured at the last minute and replaced has just replaced its leading man at the last minute because he's injured.

A lot of people immediately began presuming that the medical problems are a cover story; that something more serious prompted the switch. This article in a British newspaper says that Dreyfuss was just not ready.

So now the speculation can shift over to wondering how much it cost to get his replacement. I'm guessing that after twelve weeks at Drury Lane, they'll be replacing the "Drury" part of the signs with "Nathan."

My wrist is improving. Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions about what to do about it. (Most of you suggested a trackball and I may — you'll excuse the expression — give one a whirl.)

People keep forwarding me links to articles about the bulge on the back of George W. Bush during the debates…and so far, I haven't seen one with any hard info; just so-called "experts" saying things that are mostly inconclusive. Unless someone comes forth with an intercepted audio recording of Karl Rove dictating talking points during one of the discussions, I'm inclined to think it will remain an Urban Legend.

People also keep forwarding polls to me. Can we just agree that Bush and Kerry are neck and neck and that if you shop around, you can find polls that have either ahead in the national popular vote or in certain key swing states for electoral supremacy? You can also find plenty of reasons to not believe the polls that don't have your guy ahead. This election has more unknown quantities in the voting patterns than any we've ever had in this country, and I suspect the pollsters will begin narrowing the spread as we near Election Day. Not that they cheat but the supreme humiliation for a public opinion survey group is to solidly predict for Candidate A when Candidate B wins, and it's not unprecedented for a pollster to make a last-minute "too close to call" prediction just to cover his derriere. Regardless, I don't sense that even the polls that have someone substantially ahead are all that confident of their findings.

Here's a link to an article out of the Knight-Ridder Washington Bureau that's headlined, "Post-war planning non-existent." Pretty damning stuff.

On a comic book message board, someone recently posted a message saying that someone else had told him that a certain then-beginning comic artist had ghosted Jack Kirby's last few stories for Marvel in 1969-1970. Several of you have written to me and asked, in essence, "This is nonsense, right?" Right. Utter nonsense.

Okay, that's it for tonight. Back to nursing the wrist and meeting the deadline.

A Disney stockholders suit against Michael Eisner is coming to trial. Here's an article about it.

The most interesting item to me is where it says, "[Michael Ovitz] charged the company as much as $125 a person for food served at executive meetings at his house, an amount later reduced to $15 as he neared the end of his tenure." What did he serve that cost $125 a plate, what did he serve that was $15, what did people say who'd eaten there under both budgets…and what do you want to bet that most of us would have preferred the cheaper meal?

Posting may be kind of light here the next few days. I have an important deadline and a bad wrist. After years of ache-free computering, I finally developed a pain in my Carpals (or thereabout) from moving the mouse around. Rest, warm compresses and an Ace wrist band have lessened the hurt…but I've fallen behind on things that need to be done, plus I'm working at about half-speed. So while I'll still be putting stuff up here, it'll mostly be links and they may be fewer and farther-between than usual.

Do not delete me from your bookmarks. I'll be myself again before the week is out.

The Tampa Tribune is a right-wing newspaper that, with one exception, has endorsed every Republican presidential nominee since Eisenhower. The one exception was Barry Goldwater and that year, they decided both candidates were unacceptable and endorsed no one. This year, they've come to the same decision.

I just changed the link to the Ron Suskind article in the previous posting. Same article, different link, no New York Times subscription necessary. In fact, here's the link again.