Jonathan Franzen on growing up with Charlie Brown. Not the best piece of this nature that you'll ever read but worth a click.

Somewhere on this page, you'll find a wise and perceptive review of this book.

I've read an awful lot of "Why Bush Won" articles the last few weeks. Democrats are too nice. Democrats are too nasty. Democrats need to be more like Republicans. Democrats need to be more like Democrats. Democrats have to look more to the future. Democrats have to remind America of their past achievements. Democrats need to define "values." Democrats need to forget about "values" and press "solutions." Democrats need to stop listening to people saying what Democrats need to do. Democrats need to — well, you get the concept. In most cases, the advice seems to me to be trying to take an election that may have been lost for a wide range of reasons and distill it down to one quick fix. (Very few seem to even mention the possibility that maybe John Kerry just failed to excite enough people to the point of convincing them to change horses.)

Here's Robert Kuttner with one of the best articles I've read on the topic of "Why Bush Won." There's a lot more that could be said but this piece struck me as casting a wide, reasonable net.

I write a lot about TiVos here because…well, because I have several and think they're the best thing to happen to television since Chuck Barris stopped producing shows. But really what I'm enthused about is Personal Video Recorders, of which the TiVo is but one brand. Here's a site that compares and contrasts several different brands.

The folks over at TV Party — a fine site which you should visit often — have posted video clips of a 1985 interview with the great Jack Kirby. As you'll see, Jack had a tendency to wander in his thoughts when he was being interviewed. You'd ask him about A and he'd reply about B, all the time confusing it with C. Brilliant minds sometimes work that way, and Jack had one of those, along with the skill to put some of what it imagined down on paper. For those of you who never got to meet Jack or hear him speak, this should give you some idea of what he was like…though in private, when he was making less of an effort to be entertaining, he was somewhat more coherent and deeper.

Tom Shales discusses the man in charge of the Federal Communications Commission. [Washington Post, registration perhaps required] The only thing I'd quibble with in this piece is that I'm more bothered by Michael Powell's love of media mergers — the kind that annihilate small, privately-owned stations — than by his slapping fines on broadcasters who air material he considers objectionable. Shales did mention both abuses of power but the fines are one-time incidents and those errant policies can be easily reversed. Undoing the mergers will be a lot more difficult.

Here's Congressman Ron Paul on Federal spending. I don't agree with everything this man believes but I agree with everything in this speech.

Michael Kinsley says that the current mess in Iraq has become a war that many people think is wrong but don't wish to stop. [Washington Post, registration probably required]

I'm a big fan of the shows of Cirque du Soleil, that wonderful mesh of astonishing acrobatics, great costuming, haunting music, expert choreography and incomprehensible storylines. So naturally, I had to go see, as I did last night, the new show by Normand Latourelle, one of the founders of Cirque du Soleil. Cavalia is more or less the same thing, only with horses — 37, to be exact, appearing with a merry band of riders who put them through their paces. There are also acrobats who do impossible physical feats, often with the horses galloping past them, and the whole thing is presently housed out by the Santa Monica Pier in a white, 26,264-square-foot circus big top.

Before I get to the show itself, I want to kvetch about the seats. They're plastic bleachers, the kind where the whole row shakes if the guy nine chairs down from you crosses his legs. Which he probably can't do because anyone taller than Herve Villechaize is going to be darned uncomfy. I'm 6'3" and after we were seated but before the show started, I was seriously considering not staying for it. Two hours in that vise and my legs would have had worse circulation than anything I ever wrote for Eclipse Comics. My friend Carolyn, who often takes better care of me than I do of myself, went and talked to a nice gent who relocated our party of four to the front row, which was somewhat better. Still, I had to wonder how someone taller than me could possibly cope with having his kneecaps resting on his ears.

So much for the seats. Now, did I like the show? No, I did not like the show…though in fairness, a lot of those present (including at least half of my party) liked it very much. I thought the acrobatics, though splendidly executed, were rather pedestrian; nothing I hadn't seen before, including Cirque shows where they were the prelude to more spectacular stuff. The costumes and music failed to thrill me. In fact, there was something about the music that seemed to suck about half the energy out of the tent.

Mostly though, it was the horses…and I like horses. Never rode one, and it's been years since I touched one…but I certainly appreciate the special human-horse "bond" that Cavalia celebrates. What I think I stopped appreciating about ten minutes into the show was Trained Animal acts. The horses trot in precision. They bow. They leap over small hurdles. They dance and walk sideways in lockstep and do all the things they've been trained to do. And as they were doing all those things last evening, I suddenly decided I didn't like Animal Acts just as displays of what an animal can be trained to do. The acts I like create some context and perhaps a little story and personality. The mere fact that a horse can be made to replicate certain actions every night, with matinees on the weekend, is of no more interest than the fact that an alarm clock can be set to go off at a desired time.

I guess I was expecting more of Cavalia. There were some nice moments here and there, and the horses sure were pretty. But at $80-90 a ticket, I won't be going back. Especially to sit in those seats.

When they make a movie of the life of George W. Bush, who should play him? There's only one person.

Got my Podhoretzes confused. I just corrected the previous item to note that I was linking to a piece by John Podhoretz and not his father, Norman Podhoretz. Some days, you can't tell your Podhoretzes without a scorecard. Thanks to Harry Podhoretz McCracken for catching my Podhoretz error.

I never thought I'd be linking to an article by John Podhoretz but a lot of things are topsy-turvy these days. Like a surprising, encouraging number of Conservative voices the last day or so, Mr. Podhoretz is condemning the recent Republican rule change that will allow Tom DeLay to remain as their leader even if, as expected, he is indicted. I do not completely concur with this piece. Podhoretz's main concern seems to be not that the change is wrong but that it's bad politics, and his view that DeLay is the victim of a zealous partisan prosecutor sounds more like spin than fact. Nevertheless, I thought the piece was worth a link.

As most of you know, I am often found at comic conventions moderating panels and interviewing the great and near-great. At the Comic-Con International in San Diego, back in 2000, writer-historian Ron Goulart and I did a tag-team interview of Harry Lampert and Marty Nodell. Harry, who passed away last week, was the artist on the first Flash story and Marty, who is happily still with us, filled much the same post on the first Green Lantern story. The panel ran around 75 minutes and was videotaped for posterity by a devoted preserver of comic history, Mike Catron. In Harry's memory, Mike has edited a 30 minute version of this panel that emphasizes the Lampert conversation, and has made it available online in QuickTime movie format. Here is where you can view it.

If you're a fan of the TV show Taxi and/or Andy Kaufman, you might want to catch/record the Saturday Night Live rerun airing late Saturday night/early Sunday morning on NBC. They're scheduled to air the full, 90-minute version of the show that originally ran on May 15, 1982, hosted by Danny DeVito. At the time, Taxi had been cancelled by ABC and not yet picked up, as it soon was, by NBC. So the monologue is DeVito complaining about the abrupt termination, and bringing on some of the cast members for a "final bow," then there's a filmed segment in which he extracts revenge by blowing up the ABC building. One wonders if NBC had decided at that point to take on Taxi and this was a way of hyping the show's merits…or if they hadn't yet decided and this episode inspired that decision. Perhaps neither occurred.

Also on this episode, faux wrestler Andy Kaufman showed footage of his famous match against real wrestler Jerry Lawler, and apologized to real wrestlers everywhere for mocking their profession. I think this may have been Kaufman's last live appearance on SNL. The following season, he was "voted off" the series forever. NBC is skipping around those years in picking their reruns so perhaps they'll run the two episodes where that happened. Next week, they're supposed to run the 5/14/83 show hosted by Ed Koch.

Two additional points on Mr. Berman: Turns out, his out-of-print CD — the one recorded in 1995 — is back in print, after all. At least, they seem to have it over at www.laugh.com, which features a terrific selection of great comedy albums, including many that were originally on vinyl. They also have CD versions of Shelley's first three albums, including Inside Shelley Berman, for a few bucks less than Amazon charges. I don't get a commission if you order from there but they're so good, I'll suggest you buy 'em there, just to encourage you to buy 'em.

(Actually, they're not all good. Inside Shelley Berman is great. Outside Shelley Berman is very, very good. The Edge of Shelley Berman is much weaker, and I believe Shelley has said that it was done as a contractual commitment and that he never cared for it. Live Again!, which is the one I heard recorded, is terrific. Maybe someday soon, they'll put out his other ones, including A Personal Appearance and The Sex Life of the Primate, both of which were wonderful.)

Also: Someone wrote to ask if there was any reason I didn't mention that I directed Shelley Berman when he did a voice on Garfield and Friends. No reason, other than that it was such a minor moment in his career that I didn't think it warranted mention. He was very funny and very professional, and he seemed a little embarrassed when I tried to tell him how much his work had always meant to me. One of the great parts of doing that show was that I got to hire a number of folks who were in that category, like Stan Freberg, Jonathan Winters, Imogene Coca and Paul Winchell. I'm sure Shelley Berman doesn't even remember that hour or so we spent in a recording studio but I sure won't ever forget it.