Here's a website that will interest fans of adventure newspaper strips. It's called "The Rules of Attraction" and it gives us a nice overview of illustrators like Stan Drake and Ken Bald who brought a dramatic, realistic look to the funny pages. (Thanks to Wayne DeWald for calling it to my attention. Nice meeting you in San Diego too, Wayne.)

I like comic strips about comic strips. Here we find Russell Myers making a nice little comment in a Broom-Hilda Sunday page.

Here's an interview with Carl Reiner about The Alan Brady Show, an animated project that debuts this evening on TV Land.

It isn't mentioned in the piece but Mr. Reiner was a member of the voice cast of the 1964 Saturday morning cartoon show, Linus the Lion-Hearted, along with Sheldon Leonard, Ruth Buzzi, Jonathan Winters, Gerry Matthews and Bob McFadden. Leonard did the voice of Linus while Reiner played Billie the Bird (an extremely annoying mockingbird) and most of the other supporting roles in the Linus segments. At the time, of course, Leonard and Reiner were producing The Dick Van Dyke Show, which I've mentioned once or twice on this site.

The Linus the Lion-Hearted show is largely unseen these days. Each of the cartoons in it was based around a different character from a Post cereal box (Linus was spokeslion for Crispy Critters, "the one and only cereal that comes in the shape of animals") and Post funded the series. One day, the F.C.C. declared it a half-hour commercial and it was gone. By the time deregulation decided that half-hour commercials were okay, no one was interested in reviving the program.

If you have RealPlayer installed, you can hear Mr. Reiner in action. A fine website called Toon Tracker has put up an episode at this link and in it, Carl Reiner seems to do the speaking voices of everyone but Linus. They have more info on the show over on this page.

So Wisconsin State Senator Tom Reynolds gets up at a town hall meeting in his state and vows that he will fight the appointment of a woman named Helene Nelson to a certain state office. Everyone present cheers.

But then afterward, someone has to tell Reynolds that Helene Nelson was confirmed to the post last June. What's more, the vote was unanimous, and Reynolds was among those who so voted.

Informed of this, he replied, "I would have to talk to my staff. I'm not sure if that's so…I'll have to check with my staff to see how I voted…It had not occurred to me that that vote had taken place."

Here's the long version of the story.

Andy Ihnatko pulls an Emily Litella with regard to the "Fair and Balanced" weblog campaign.

I get about three e-mails a week asking me where one can see Garfield and Friends, a TV series I wrote for much of a decade. Some folks also want to know if and when the last 48 episodes, which have never been in syndication, will be in syndication. I don't know about that last part but the first 73 continue to be syndicated to some cities and not others, and they'll be running on Toon Disney starting some time next month. Last I heard, they had us scheduled for 3:00 in the morning which means our main competition is Jeffersons reruns, the commercial for the Scooter Shop, and an informercial for blemish creme. I think we can take them.

Jules Feiffer draws up a nice little comic strip recalling the 1965 blackout in New York. Here's the link.

I vaguely recall watching (and enjoying) Dotto, a game show that was on both CBS and NBC in 1958. It is now best remembered as the first quiz program to be outed for giving the contestants the answers in advance. This triggered a cascade of similar revelations about shows like Twenty-One and The 64 Thousand Dollar Question — the infamous Game Show Scandals. Here we have a good article about Dotto and what happened there.

Here's an example of something that annoys me about reporting these days. The headline on this story and many others in this morning's newspapers is "Poll shows Bustamante leading Schwarzenegger." The story then goes on to tell us that according to a Field Poll released on Friday, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante holds a three-point lead over Arnold Schwarzenegger among those likely to vote in the Oct. 7 recall election.

Okay. But way down at the end of the article, one might notice this line…

The Field Poll, conducted by telephone from Sunday to Wednesday, interviewed 629 registered voters. It has an error rate of plus or minus 5 percentage points.

So Bustamante has a three-point lead in a poll with a five-point margin of error. Doesn't that mean that they're tied? That Schwarzenegger could even be ahead of him?

One could argue that the poll is inaccurate or that it's way too early for a poll to be meaningful. But leaving such questions aside, shouldn't its findings be reported for what they are, which is kind of a dead heat?

The other interesting thing here is that the folks running the September 17 debate have said they'll invite the top six contenders, as determined by the polls. If the numbers of this Field Poll hold up, that would mean Bustamante, Schwarzenegger, McClintock, Simon, Ueberroth and Huffington. But remember: This poll has a five-point margin of error. So Larry Flynt, Gallagher, Angelyne and all those folks who currently have 1% or less could actually be ahead of Arianna Huffington, who has 4%. Betcha Flynt's lawyers could do something with that.

As a kid, I was a huge fan of Allan Sherman, song parody author extraordinaire. I collected all his albums and can still sing, from memory, almost all of his songs in a voice even worse than his. And of course he inspired me to start writing my own song parodies, which has led to occasionally writing lyrics for songs on TV shows I work on.

I never got to meet the man. The closest I came were a few brief conversations with his son, who was two years ahead of me at University High. Though Robert Sherman went on to a career in the TV business, our paths have somehow never crossed.

So I was quite interested to read this article, which is about how Robbie's trips to summer camp inspired his father's million-selling hit, "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh." You may enjoy it even though you didn't go to high school with the guy.

My pal Steve Rude has put together a sketchbook which, at the moment, I believe is only being sold via eBay. It will presumably be available elsewhere but there's no reason for you not to go to this link and buy one. Steve is one of the best comic artists around and one of the nicest guys.

Vince Waldron has been in touch with the producer of the forthcoming Dick Van Dyke Show DVD sets. He reports that the advertising is wrong: The second volume includes 33 episodes, not 31. One of those 33 is "All About Eavesdropping," which was filmed as part of the second season but aired in the third. This sounds Fair and maybe even Balanced.

I have no idea what the name means, either. But it's the name of the new, R-rated Vegas show from the Cirque du Soleil people. Here's a Fair and Balanced sneak peek at this odd production.

Happy Fair and Balanced dreams!

Another interesting take on Mr. Schwarzenegger's candidacy. If nothing else, the fact that this thing is so utterly without precedent is spawning a wide range of viewpoints. And of course, all of them are Fair and Balanced.