At the taping for last night's Late Show With David Letterman, a demonstration went wrong and a snowboarder was injured, apparently not seriously. Nevertheless, the taping was halted and that episode was not completed. If you'd like to know what it was like for those in the studio audience, an attendee posted this message to the Letterman newsgroup. (I hope that link works. Linking to newsgroup messages is an inexact science.)

I mentioned computer viruses earlier. We all have to have a good anti-virus program installed to scan for them (I use Norton) but we also want to keep an eye out for Spyware. These are programs or little files that websites put on our computers in order to find out things about those who surf their sites. Usually, the info they collect is pretty harmless but (1) it's none of their business anyway, (2) sometimes it isn't harmless and (3) Spyware on your computer can reduce its performance level. So we want to keep our computers free of this stuff. The three leading programs that detect and delete Spyware seem to be…

• Ad-Aware – They have a free version and a pay version, and the former will probably be enough for most folks.
• Spybot Search & Destroy – Free but they request donations.
• Pest Patrol – You can download a copy for free that will scan your system and find Spyware. But you have to pay $40 for the version that will remove the intruders it locates.

Now, you're probably wondering which of these you should use. If you want to be truly Spyware-free, the answer is "all of them." I update and run all three about once a week and each finds something the others didn't. In some cases, that's because one program finds out about a given piece of Spyware before the others do. In other cases, the folks behind these detectors simply disagree on how much info a cookie has to gather before they declare it Spyware. I recommend you try at least one…and make sure you update it before each use.

Former president Jimmy Carter is publishing a weblog of his travels.

If you get the MyDoom com computer virus (or any of around 36 of the most popular viruses currently making the rounds), your system can probably be saved by the free Avert Stinger program offered by the McAfee people. It's no substitute for real virus protection but if you catch something, this utility should be able to remove it. Here's the link.

And here's Michael Kinsley's latest column, which is about how Democrats seem to be fumbling about to find the candidate who is least likely to appeal to Democrats. Well, that's not it exactly. Read it and you'll understand.

We're all about to get quite weary of hashing and rehashing the issue of gay marriage. It probably is not, like guns and abortion and where to get the best pizza, one of those ceaseless arguments. That is, it has a resolution but right now, none of those arguing it in the public arena are looking for a solution or compromise; they want to keep it going until they win in full. Many are also eager to use it as a tool to win some election and/or unseat some incumbent.

There actually is a quickie solution, though almost no one will go for it. Last July, Michael Kinsley offered this concept that would work great if everyone really wanted to hurry and put the issue behind us. But among those who argue such things in legislatures and the press, no one really does. It's too tempting a battleground to, on the one hand, argue for less government intervention into bedrooms and the other, fight against what some see as a perilous decline of the family unit. There are also, of course, homosexuals and homophobes and never the twain shall meet.

I think gay marriage is inevitable in this country and like certain past issues of civil rights, its opponents will come to be ashamed of what may now seem to them as a principled stance. But I also think it's going to take a while. We're still at the stage when most candidates (and I include both Bush and Kerry in this) look like their carefully-worded positions come out of focus groups and polling, not their respective hearts. There are votes to be harvested so we have to listen to what I consider a bogus argument that gay marriage somehow undermines straight marriage. It certainly doesn't speak well for straight marriage that it can be harmed if the two guys down the street, who are already committed to one another, add an extra level of stability to that commitment and get a better insurance plan.

Amidst all the debate, public opinion will swing back and forth. At some point, the pendulum will swing far enough in favor of gay marriage that it will become the law of the land in most states…and nothing catastrophic will occur. Straight marriages will not suffer irreparable damage. God will not smite us all or send locusts to devour our crops. A lot of people who are currently in the middle on the issue but leaning against gay rights will realize it's not that big a deal if we acknowledge what already exists and give those folks a little more dignity and a few less legal obstacles to happiness. Suddenly, all those leaners will lean the other way and that will take all the steam out of the "anti" side, and we can move on to some other silly battle that also needn't be fought.

That's how I think it will end, but it's going to take a while, especially if the drive to amend the Constitution picks up enough momentum. Right now, there are too many people incensed on the issue, if only because they see it as a symbol of many things they don't like in this world. And there are too many parties who think they can manipulate those incensed people for political advantage. Some of us will be sick of the arguments before the year is out, some before the month is out. I figure I'm good for about another ten days of it. Two weeks, tops.

Scott Shaw! makes no claim to being an unbiased reviewer of the new book by his pal, Floyd Norman. But he comes to all the same conclusions that I came to when I reviewed the same book by my pal, Floyd Norman.

An author-publisher named Clifford Meth is involved in a campaign to convince Marvel Comics, either out of decency or to avoid rotten publicity, to pay royalties to artist Dave Cockrum. Dave and writer Len Wein revamped the old, cancelled X-Men property into the new, wildly profitable X-Men franchise. Now, Dave is ill and unable to work and this article details how Meth and artist Neal Adams are disagreeing on some aspects of the situation — though both agree Dave should receive large checks. (So do I. If I can't get quite as militant about this as they are, it's because I've been through this with too many creators who were in a comparable or worse situation. I may just have exhausted my passion for such crusades.)

The article makes some solid points but when it references Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, it gets some facts wrong. One is the spelling of "Shuster." Search the Internet for comic websites that pay tribute to the creators of Superman and you'll find an amazing array with one or both names misspelled. Then, Siegel and Shuster did not approach National Periodicals with Superman. They submitted it to a syndicate operation that had a division that also printed comic books. That division showed it to DC Comics (it was not yet National Periodicals) and DC approached Jerry and Joe. This may seem like a minor distinction but in the current legal battle over Superman's copyright, this little detail matters a lot.

Also: The settlement Siegel and Shuster received on their Superboy lawsuit was not huge, even for that period, and it is just plain wrong to say that "neither Siegel nor Shuster were able to get work in the industry again." They both had plenty of work in the years that followed. Siegel wrote at one time or another for almost every comic company that was in business, including a return to DC where he authored some wonderful Superman stories between 1959 and 1965. Shuster got art jobs as long as his eyesight held up, which was sadly not for long. I think what happened to both those men was horrible but they certainly got work in the industry after the lawsuit was settled in '48.

Meth's recounting of Neal Adams' crusade to establish credits and a pension for Siegel and Shuster is correct but incomplete. Neal did wonderful, heroic things but so did other folks. Jerry Robinson, for example, was heavily involved in the final negotiations. (I don't mean to take anything away from Neal. Just trying to set the record straight.)

As for Dave Cockrum's situation…Dave's a helluva great guy and a tremendous talent. His contributions to the X-Men have led to zillions of dollars in toy sales alone, without even getting into comic book sales and movies and DVDs and other sources of income based on his designs. I am skeptical that Marvel will create the precedent of cutting him in, but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

I may have one of the very few weblogs that ever links to both sides of a debate. If you're interested in this little argument over the National Guard Service (or lack, thereof) on the part of the current Oval Office occupant, here are two opposing views. Eric Boehlert over at Salon says that the evidence doesn't add up in Bush's favor. This article from the now-defunct George magazine says that it does. If Kerry's the nominee, we're going to hear a lot more about this.

I've had a nice e-mail exchange with Bill Stosin, the gent who used my posting here in a letter to the Washington Times. (It also made it into his hometown paper, The Daily Iowan. Here's a link to the page.)

No writer likes to see his work appear with someone else's name on it, but it's not like this is the first time this has happened to me. Or the worst. Anyway, I've decided to grant him retroactive permission for this one. If anyone else wants to crib something from this page, please write and ask. If it's for a good cause, I'll probably say yes.

Also, I should mention: I screwed up my mail server this afternoon so for about three hours, if you sent me an e-mail it did get to me but you received a "bounce" message that said it didn't. I am weeks behind on e-mail so the response may be the same as if I didn't receive it.

Here, in the interest of fairness, is the case against Bush as deserter. I don't know which argument is correct and I'm not sure that in politics it matters all that much. As with certain arguable accusations against Clinton and Gore, those who are already on the guy's side either won't believe the charge against their guy or won't acknowledge it, and those who were already against him take it as absolute fact. It all comes down to tarnishing the candidate's image a little with swing voters. Don't you wish this kind of thing could be resolved outside the arena of presidential politics?

Received an e-mail this morning from Bill Stosine…or at least, someone purporting to be Bill Stosine. On the Internet, you never know. But I think it was him and he apologized. He said he hoped I wasn't angry about him lifting a few paragraphs from this page and sending them off to newspapers under his signature. (He says he sent fifty. Let's see if anyone besides the Washington Times runs it.)

This is one of those things I probably should be angry about but for some reason, I'm not. In an odd way, I'm flattered. I can't say I'll feel that way the next time it happens but this minor bit of theft struck me as more amusing than not. And I can't really explain why.

Actually, his apology was rather nicely worded. Hope he didn't steal it from someone else.

From this morning's news reports…

Clark, the retired Army general, held a slight lead over Edwards in Oklahoma with all precincts reporting after Tuesday's vote. But the race was so close that no winner could be declared until the vote is certified by state elections board next week.

Hey, maybe the Supreme Court could step in again and declare Bush the winner.

There's a letter in the "Letters to the Editor" section of today's Washington Times from someone named Bill Stosine of Iowa City, Iowa. Here it is in its entirety:

Federal Communications Commissioner Michael Powell says: "I am outraged at what I saw during the halftime show. … Our nation's children, parents and citizens deserve better."

He's talking about the fleeting shot of one of Janet Jackson's breasts, but he could have been talking about the endless procession of ads for pills that induce erections.

However, the chances of Mr. Powell or anyone else in the Bush administration taking umbrage or action against a pharmaceutical company are about the same as the chances of me playing in next year's Super Bowl. And winning.

Mr. Powell wants communications conglomerates bigger and bigger and bigger — so CBS asking corporate brother MTV (they're both owned by giant media conglomerate Viacom) to produce the halftime show is what he gets.

Don't parts of this letter sound a little familiar?

Getting back to the matter of the F.C.C. investigating the Janet Jackson breast flash on the Super Bowl…

Some folks seem to be troubled that it takes weeks, sometimes months, to get the Bush administration to agree that an inquiry is warranted into a matter that involved security leaks, people being sent to die in a war founded on faulty intelligence, whether 9/11 was preventable, etc. But show a bare breast on TV and ten seconds later, a thorough investigation is underway. The comparison is stretching a bit to underscore how reticent the current administration to do anything that might point up its errors or shortcomings but the mindset is the same: We only want to do investigations which will help us politically. I suspect that's a lot more common in all corners of government than we like to admit.

The troubling thing to me about the Super Bowl investigation is this: What's to investigate? Either it was or wasn't planned. If it was (as seems likely), then a couple of MTV producers, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake made the decision to flash nipple and the F.C.C. is not going to prosecute them and may not even have the authority to do so. What the F.C.C. can do is stick it to CBS. The idea here is to see if they can find some way to argue that the network was culpable and to use that to pressure them in other ways. At the same time, it puts all companies that hold broadcast licenses on notice that they'd better not tick off the folks in power.

There are people out there who think television has gotten too raw and too sensationalized. And you know what? Those people cannot win. They can pressure the networks to tone it down for a little while and even dole out a few punishments…but the liberation of public language and standards only goes in one direction, which is to get looser. Trying to roll that back is like trying to stuff toothpaste back into the tube. Can't be done.

What F.C.C. Commissioner Powell may be able to do is remind networks that he can make things very unpleasant for them. That's what the "investigation" is all about. They're going to investigate ways to use this against CBS.