Earlier, I posted a link to an article on Salon about false accusations against the Clintons by both the media and many current members of the Washington power elite. Apparently, that article is officially appearing tomorrow in Salon, and was only up this morning for a brief test period or by accident. But I read it and linked to it, and the link is apparently good, even though if you go over to Salon on your own right now and look for it, you won't find it.

Howie Mandel's a nice, funny guy — and yes, the story is apparently true of how he became a comedian. One night, he was taken to the Comedy Store strictly as an audience member. It was "open mike night," where anyone who thinks they have an act can sign up and get a few minutes to perform. Howie didn't have an act — or didn't think he had an act — but sign-ups were light that night, so when all the scheduled wanna-bes were done, he got up there, almost on a dare, and ad-libbed what turned out to be the funniest set of the evening. It started him on the road to performing and he's never looked back, turning into an amazing success. Why, he even has his own website! (P.S. When you go there, the opening screen will give you your choice of English or Italian. Pick the English, then go back to that screen and select Italian. Well, it made me laugh.)

Eric Shanower's another one of those artists I barely know. I think we exchanged about six words at one convention, which was not enough for me to tell him that I've always admired his work as both an illustrator and writer. So I'll tell you…and point you towards his website.

Robin Cook is the former foreign minister of Britain who resigned from the Cabinet over the decision to go to war with Iraq. He authored this article which does not speak well of Donald Rumsfeld.

A.S.I.F.A. stands for "Association Internationale du Film D'Animation." Just call it, like most folks do, "the animation society." The group does much to preserve and promote animation and its history so we're glad to have it around. They also stage wonderful events. It isn't listed yet on their website but the Hollywood Chapter has an evening coming up to honor the late, great voice actor — and one of the nicest men I ever knew — Daws Butler. It's on July 31 and it will celebrate the release of a new book, Scenes for Actors and Voices, which reprints many of the exercises that Daws wrote for the wonderful acting classes he used to teach in a little workshop in the back of his house. Some of the best voice actors working today studied with him in that garage and read these scenes under his supervision, and now they've been compiled into a book by Ben Ohmart and Joe Bevilacqua. Joe was among Daws's students, as were Corey Burton and Nancy Cartwright, who will be there that evening to perform scenes and autograph the book. One of Daws's best friends, the fabulous June Foray, will also participate.

I'll point you to a link with more details as soon as one is posted but for now, I thought those of you who are in Southern California would like to mark the date. That's the evening of Thursday, July 31, commencing at 7:30 at the Glendale Public Library Auditorium.

Here's a link to an article in Salon entitled, "The Media Gets Impeachment Wrong Again." The premise is that the various "crimes" of the Clintons have been stunningly misreported and that many of those who drove baseless charges have been well-rewarded for a bogus impeachment effort. I don't agree with every word of this article but I believe it is more right than wrong.

When I watch the old To Tell the Truth shows on Game Show Network, I'm constantly reminded how long Tom Poston has been around and how consistently funny he's been. Here's a link to his website.

A lot of people have heard the name of Rube Goldberg used as an adjective, or as a noun to denote a needlessly complex machine. As some of them may know, that was the name of a great cartoonist whose comic strips often depicted odd contraptions. You can find out more about him at this website.

And I feel like I should include a link to the video of that great Honda commercial which may represent the all-time greatest application of Rube Goldberg Physics. If you haven't seen it and you have Flash installed, go see it. If you have seen it, you'll want to see it again. And either way, you'll want to read about how it was done.

The prominent person in the animation field who lives right near where that plane crashed is Jerry Beck of Cartoon Research. Since Jerry's discussing the incident on his site (on this page), I guess it's okay to reveal this.

Around 5:00, I watched a little of the local news coverage of the aforementioned plane crash. I was amazed how poor a job the stations were doing of reporting a pretty simple event that occurred on their home turf. Makes you wonder how accurate they can be with complex events or those in far-off lands. Over and over, they kept telling us to stay away from the area because the streets were swarming with spectators, so emergency vehicles were having a tough time getting through. You have to wonder if maybe part of the problem was that there were eight thousand reporters there with camera crews and mobile unit vans. At one point from my window, I could count eight helicopters hovering above the site. On the ground, news personnel were packed in so densely that you'd see a guy from Channel 4 reporting and in the same shot, you could see reporters from Channel 2 and Channel 7 talking to their cameras.

The multiplicity of correspondents might have made some sense if there had been an involved, complicated tale to tell…but it was one of those cases where they could have told us everything that was known in about four minutes. Alas, since it was Breaking News, they had to stay with it so they kept saying the same things over and over — though not the one fact I wanted to hear, which was if there had been damage to surrounding homes. (As mentioned, I have a friend who lives practically across the street from where the plane hit. He's fine, by the way.) The time was filled via two means. One was by grabbing neighbors, some of whom had helped folks trapped in the burning apartment house, and trying to wring out of them either horrifying accounts or tales of heroism. The other time-filler was pure, unadulterated speculation, particularly as to whether this was an act of terrorism. They kept trying to get police and fire officials — and an obliging councilman who came by for a photo-op — to theorize as to whether the plane flying into the apartment house could possibly have been the work of organized terrorists. Everyone said the same thing; that there was no evidence of any sort to suggest that. But I guess the angle was too intriguing not to keep bringing it up, if only to say there was no reason to believe that…yet. (As I write this, the 11:00 News is on and the lead story, at least on the channel I'm watching, is that police say it wasn't terrorism. Good — but no one except TV reporters ever said it might be.)

I remember local TV covering fires, riots, quakes, floods, shoot-outs, and other plane crashes, and I won't say they were always models of restrained journalism. There was one period when reporters seemed appallingly eager to ask people who'd just suffered tragedies, "How does it feel to see your family killed?" or "How does it feel to see your house go up in flames?" But those were isolated cases and after local TV critics complained about it a few times, the stations seem to have told their correspondents not to ask that. For the most part, the goal back then seemed to inform. Now, it seems to be to impress you that they're all over the story and that there's no point in changing the channel. In that, they succeed…because I don't change the channel. I turn the set off.

A small airplane crashed into a three-story apartment house in the Fairfax area of Los Angeles this afternoon. Here are some details.

I'm getting calls and e-mails from friends asking me if this occurred near me. No, it didn't. But it's about two blocks from the Golden Apple bookstore, which many visitors to this site probably know well. It's also about half a block from the home of a prominent fellow in the animation field. I think he'd prefer I not mention his name here but since folks are also asking me if he's okay, I'll say that as far as I know, neither he nor his home have been harmed.

Here's an article. And here's a quick summary of that article: Boy, the present administration is sure taking its own sweet time about enacting measures which might prevent a major terrorism attack.

Here's an article by David Corn, not so much about Bush lying but about the fact that no one seems to care much.

I've just added links on our main page for syndication in RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 format. If you don't know what this means, don't ask me because I'm not sure I do, either. But thanks to Jason Bergman and others who alerted me that Movable Type (the software that brings you this site) configured it for me without my asking. If only anything else in life happened so effortlessly.