Debuting this Sunday on the Travel Channel: The Marvel Super Heroes' Guide to New York City. Stan Lee, Roy Thomas, Joe Simon, John Romita and other great creators of Marvel Comics participate in a tour of Manhattan. The emphasis, as I understand it, is on locations where great scenes from comic book stories were set. It airs at 8:00 PM and again at 11:00 PM on my satellite dish. Check your local listings.

Fred Kaplan discusses the mess we're in in Iraq and how there may be no solution. I would like to believe he's wrong but suspect he is not. Please, someone…point me to an article that is more than Bush-Cheney puffery and offers a more optimistic appraisal.

Gail Sheehy discusses what Donald Rumsfeld did the morning of 9/11. Between now and Election Day, I think we're going to hear a lot more about this, and about what Bush did (or didn't do) that morn.

Here's a New York Times double feature: This article reports the shocking news that one-third of Bush's tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1% of income. Could have knocked me over with a feather.

Then, keeping that in mind, you might want to read Paul Krugman as he claims that Bush is trying to shift the tax burden from those who make money through investments to those who make money by working. Someday in this country, someone will come along who will believe in tax cuts across the board that do not slash the burden of one group at the expense of another.

Had a nice evening at Vince Waldron's monthly "Totally Looped" show up in Hollywood. Here's how this works: Vince, who is an award-winning writer-director-producer, assembles a troupe of talented actors skilled in improvisational comedy. Then he shows film clips that these folks have not seen. Then they have to do live dubbing, ad-libbing dialogue for the clips to make them address a topic that the live audience has suggested. The troupe last night consisted of (I hope I don't leave anyone out) Dan Castellaneta, Rick Kuhlman, Deb Lacusta, Rick Overton, Angela V. Shelton, Danny Mann and Edie McClurg.

If I may digress slightly — and since it's my weblog, no power on Earth can stop me — the Art of Improv Comedy has sustained some body blows in the last few decades. About the time performers started going from Saturday Night Live to huge movie careers, a lot of actors who didn't really have the chops for improv, or even a lot of interest in it, decided that was the new route to film stardom. Suddenly, improv classes were flooded with applicants…and that wasn't, in and of itself, a bad thing. Improv training is a good thing for actors even if they intend to spend the rest of their careers working off scripts. It trains them to hold onto the character they're playing and how to react to others in a scene and, most of all, how to listen. If you're doing an improvised scene, you'd better listen.

Not every actor can improvise. Some of the most honored actors of all time, starting with Sir Laurence Olivier and working down from there, could not. Others should simply not try. In the late eighties, I went to a number of alleged improv shows which were not really improv and/or not really good. The former were playing the old Morey Amsterdam game. If someone challenged Morey to tell a joke about a kangaroo, he often came back with this one…

So one day at the zoo, the kangaroo goes crazy. He screams and then he leaps out of his cage and runs off. The zoo keeper runs up to a lady standing by the cage and asks, "What happened?" The lady says, "I don't know. I just tickled him with my umbrella and he jumped up and ran off, that's all." So the zoo keeper says, "Well, you'd better tickle me 'cause I'm the one who's got to go catch him."

That's not a great joke but it was great for Morey's purpose because you could plug in any animal. If they wanted an ocelot joke, the lady tickled an ocelot with her umbrella. If someone asked for a platypus joke, the lady tickled a platypus. A lot of what gets passed off as improv comedy these days is like that: Fill in the blanks. So it's nice to see the crew Mr. Waldron has assembled. They're genuine improv performers, operating sans template. I especially love the little rambling introductions that Dan Castelleneta stammers out for the clips. Not only do we not know where he's going with them, it's obvious that Dan doesn't really know, either. That's the beauty of improv and the fact that he's very funny is an added bonus.

I would single out the other performers individually but I have a problem. As they dub the clips, they're sitting there in the dark doing rapid voice changes so it's not always easy to tell who's talking. Afterwards when we were mingling, I wanted to compliment whoever came up with a couple of specific lines but I wasn't sure which one to praise. My sense was that these people are all really good. There were some tech problems with the projector during the show, with some clips ending in premature blackouts. Being good improv performers, the players just worked it into the scenes and kept on going. The s.r.o. audience was delighted.

The next "Totally Looped" show is September 9 and details are at this website. I'll remind you when we get closer to that date but if you're near Hollywood (they're in the theater right next to the Improv on Melrose) you might want to jot it down now. They don't do these shows often enough.

P.S. At the end of the show, Edie McClurg announced that Dan C. just won his third Emmy for his voiceover performances on The Simpsons. Good pick.

Last year, I purchased (online) a couple of Vornado portable heaters from Costco. Today, I received an e-mail from Costco telling me that the models I'd received were the subject of a recall — something about them having a tendency to burst into flames or some other technicality like that. The message told me how to get my heaters replaced or repaired at no cost to me. (If you have Vornado heaters, go to their website and check out the details.) Maybe this happens all the time but it's new to me, and I was impressed with Costco making the effort to alert its customers.

Actually, I make jokes about their vastness and the fact that you can't buy a small anything there. But the more I go to Costco or order online and the more I read about how they run their business, the more impressed I am.

Also: If you live in Los Angeles, you might want to check out Restaurant Watch, a free site that monitors the Hygiene Inspection Violations in our local restaurants. You can build a little online database of the places you dine and you'll see the results of inspections and you can even be e-mailed when the places on your list are reinspected. What I found out is that I've been laboring under a delusion. I'd assumed that the expensive, ritzy-looking eateries I frequent would be among the cleanest and that the "dives" with cheap food would be questionable. Turns out, on my list, it's the other way around. One of my favorite "slightly expensive" place to eat — a place I dined last week, in fact — just got a score of 70 to barely earn a "C." That is very low. (There's nothing lower than a "C." 69 or below, they post the number instead of a letter, and those establishments usually scurry to correct flaws and get re-evaluated. Either that or they get closed down.) On the other hand, the two Sizzlers I occasionally visit both scored in the nineties for an "A," as did many places I wouldn't have expected.

By the way: If you do sign up there, don't read the details of those inspections. Even the ones that get the top grades have something wrong back in the kitchen. You don't really want to know what's in your frankfurters, either.

My buddy Bruce Reznick sends me this link to a conversation with Richard Pryor. A bunch of stand-up comics ask him questions, one of which is pretty stupid.

Alan Keyes sings a chorus of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for news cameras. Somehow, I think it's going to take more than that for him to get the gay vote.

Paul "Mousie" Garner, who died last Sunday at age 95, was a veteran performer, starting back in the halcyon days of vaudeville. He was never much of a star but he was a nice man who loved to talk about the business and especially about his affiliation with the Three Stooges. Back when it was Moe, Larry and Shemp performing on stage with Ted Healy, Mousie was the pinch-hitter, filling in when Shemp was out. Several decades later, whenever the Stooges were down a member, there would be talk of Mousie rejoining the troupe…and at one point, "Curly" Joe DeRita briefly toured with Garner and another comic, billing themselves as "The New Three Stooges."

All of that gave Mousie the right, I suppose, to bill himself as part of the famous act and since he outlived the others and was so accessible, he was the go-to guy when any Stooge chronicler needed someone to interview. He actually did more than serve as a standby Stooge, but not a lot more. The times I chatted with him at autograph shows, we talked about his association with Spike Jones and also with Olsen and Johnson, who sent him out in the touring company of their Broadway smash, Hellzapoppin'. He would say that he planned to "semi-retire" from show business when he hit his hundredth birthday. I'm not sure what that meant since he sure didn't seem to be working the last few decades…but it's still a shame he didn't make it to retirement age.

My pal Earl Kress and I have been playing around with video editing on our respective PCs and I think I need to solicit some counsel here. As I said, we have Windows-based PCs and we're looking for the perfect piece of software. We have some DVDs full of clips (not copy-protected) and we want to import them into an editing program, do some edits, add some simple wipes and dissolves and maybe dub in music and add titles, then build a menu and export to a new DVD. Sounds simple? Well, it oughta be. Earl has been fiddling with Pinnacle Studio 8 and it seems to do most of the things we want except that there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to get files off the DVD and into the program. I've had the same problem with Adobe Premiere Pro. This is above and beyond the obvious problem that all forms of video will be obsolete by the time I could possibly learn Adobe Premiere Pro.

We've tried a number of programs that claim to convert VOB files to MPEG-2 but they all seem to either truncate the clip, get the sound off-sync or fuzz up the video. Shouldn't one be able to take clips off a DVD and edit them without any of these things happening?

Of course. So I'm hereby asking if anyone here has stumbled across the perfect program(s) to do what we want. And are you converting files to MPEG-2 or AVI or what?

Like (I sure hope) most Americans, I think the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" is a bunch of Republican stooges who are out to smear John Kerry with claims that are, at best, questionable. A friend of mine who went to Vietnam says a lot of guys who received medals there might not have literally deserved them, so if some of Kerry's were based on exaggerations, that would not be unusual. I see no reason yet to assume that's the case but even if it is, it's of little relevance to whether he's fit to be Commander-in-Chief today. For that matter, I don't think the "frat boy" partyings of George W. Bush a few decades ago are all that important in judging his fitness to lead…and don't think we won't hear more about them in the weeks to come.

I'm sure those who were already disinclined to support Kerry welcome the attack on his medals. In politics these days, a lot of people aren't satisfied to believe that their guy is better than the other guy. Now, the other guy must be demonized as criminal, a fool, a pathological liar, a traitor and an all-around worthless human being. Kerry's war record was always an obstacle if you wanted to believe that of him, and it's probably nice to have someone provide you with an alternate version that removes that obstacle. Best of all, you don't even have to really believe it. You can just say, "I don't know…I hear Kerry may have cheated to get those medals…I hear Bush may have cheated on his National Guard service…let's just call that a wash." It's a nice way for some to neutralize an area where Kerry held a big advantage.

How many votes, if any, this whole thing will cost Kerry is a good guess…but you know who I do think is being hurt by this? John McCain. He's out there simultaneously denouncing the attack on Kerry's service record while he stumps for George W. Bush. That can't be a very comfortable position to be in.

McCain is one of those guys I've never quite known what to think of. I first became familiar with him when he was making some extraordinary gestures to soothe bad feelings on both sides in the aftermath of Vietnam. He reached out to some of the protesters and set what I thought was a fine example of how we all needed to put certain angers behind us. If McCain, who spent years in a P.O.W. camp could become friends with a noted anti-war activist like David Ifshin, that was cause for more optimism than a thousand speeches that "hope is on the way." I am a big believer in forgiveness and also in standing up for the other side when you think they're being wronged. McCain denouncing the nasty Swift Boats campaign against Kerry is exactly the kind of thing I've admired in the guy.

But then he's out there hugging Bush, campaigning for him, trying to do nothing that will alienate the Republican base that will select the 2008 nominee. Given what the Bush team did to McCain in the 2000 primaries, you have to wonder. Does he think Bush has nothing to do with the attacks on Kerry's record and/or can't be expected to denounce them? I doubt that, though that may have to be McCain's public position. Does he not hold Bush responsible for the attacks made on him? Again, doubtful. Has he merely forgiven Bush for those tactics because it will help the McCain in '08 campaign? If so, that's not the kind of forgiveness that once made me admire the senior Senator from the great state of Arizona. I know that he has to support the nominee of his party but there was always something nice about McCain that made me think he'd never let that obligation — or even the obvious thirst to be president — override a matter of principle. He always seemed like a Republican that Democrats could support. I am now less inclined to believe that and I'll bet I'm not the only person who feels that way.

Ben Fritz, one of the authors of All the President's Spin and a co-conspirator in Spinsanity, did an article last week for Variety and it's now available online. It's about "geek chic" at the Comic-Con, and I'm linking to it because it's a good piece, not because it quotes me. To be honest, I'll link to just about anything that quotes me but this is a good article anyway.

In the category of "I thought he was already dead," we have the passing of Robert Bootzin, a fixture of sixties' talk shows as the frenetic Gypsy Boots. I remember him mainly from his visits to Steve Allen's various talk shows. Gypsy, as everyone calls him, was sometimes described as "the first hippie." He would burst onto Steve's stage, dressed like a cross between Tarzan and Mahatma Gandhi. Displaying more than enough pep and enthusiasm to classify as a colorful crazy, he'd preach about "natural foods" and would bring berries and bark and other odd things he'd collected in Griffith Park for Steve to sample. How talk shows have changed. Today, if you worked for Leno or Letterman and you suggested they participate in something like that, you'd be fired on the spot.

Gypsy would swing on ropes, dance with women in the audience and make outrageous claims about how his lifestyle would enable him to live well into his second or maybe third century. Audiences loved him and Mr. Allen, who was no fool when it came to the creation of exciting television, kept having him back.

Mr. Bootzin didn't make it to 100. Obits like this one say he was either 89 or 91 and the confusion is understandable. When he did talk shows in the sixties, he never divulged his age and I think most of us got the idea that he was much older than his energy level would indicate. I'm amazed to find out now that he was in his fifties back then as he extolled the magic of organic figs and wheat grass and running naked through the park at daybreak. He probably wasn't as good an example of great health as we thought then. Nevertheless, he was funny and outrageous and great at self-promotion, turning up almost anywhere in Los Angeles where a crowd gathered out-of-doors. They don't make 'em like that anymore.

We've managed to dig up the info that Joe Sinnott (artist supreme) needed. Both stories appeared in Kid Colt, Outlaw #90 but were miscredited. They're listed everywhere as having been drawn wholly by Jack Keller but in fact, Keller pencilled and Sinnott inked. Thanks to all who helped solve this important question.

I like the whole idea of stem-cell research. I think the negatives about it are silly posturings by groups who are opposed to abortion rights and have wrongly decided that stem-cell research is vaguely in the same arena. On the other hand, this article by William Saletan actually caused me to slightly modify my thinking on the issue.