For twenty-some-odd years, my amigo-partner Sergio Aragonés has drawn his silly pictures in a studio that is a glorious clutter of art, toys, pinball machines, dead bodies and outright miscellany. He will soon be closing it down as part of a plan to move into new facilities. Recently, a fine photographer-friend, David Baker, photographed Sergio in his soon-to-be-vacated natural surroundings. Dave is a true artist of the camera, as you can see if you visit his website. He has taken many of the photos he shot of Sergio in that studio and made them into a photo "mosaic" of Sergio's face.

Only 200 copies have been produced of this limited edition print, signed by the both of them, and one is presently up for auction on eBay. Sergio will also be selling a few of them at his convention appearances — like this coming weekend at Wondercon in San Francisco.

If the link to eBay has expired, you can click here to get a good look at this splendid pic, which is made up of a lot of little pics of Sergio in his studio. This would be a great poster to put up outside your house, if for no other reason that no one can deface it by drawing a mustache on it. A vandal would have to go out, buy some Liquid Paper and paint the mustache out in order to deface it.

Charlie Douglass, inventor of the main device used to inject canned laughter into TV shows, has died. Here's a link to an obit, and I think we can all imagine the Saturday Night Live sketch: Someone delivering a sombre, tearful eulogy for Charlie while a guy at a machine "sweetens" it and lays in the guffaws. And I think we can count on a Leno monologue joke: Jay, in a serious tone, announces something along the lines of, "The inventor of the laugh track died today," and then they dub in some huge audience reaction.

People always say they hate it when a show has obvious canned laughter. I think it's worse when it isn't obvious — like when it's done on a live show, just in case the studio audience isn't yukking it up. Bob "Can you believe I'm this old?" Hope reportedly insisted, when he hosted the Oscars, that Charlie and his mysterious box be engaged and at the ready to augment the response. There's also a difference of honesty between sweetening a film show — like M*A*S*H or Get Smart — which a reasonably-intelligent person knows does not have a live audience, and hyping up the track for a show that pretends you're hearing actual human beings. (In a perverse way, I liked the occasional attempts, as on some early broadcasts of The Flintstones and Rocky and His Friends, to apply canned laughter to animation. Who did they think we'd think was watching the performance and laughing at it? Other cartoon characters?)

On the other hand, there can be a downside to real laughter. There are shows that have been done in front of an audience where, it seemed to me, the performers/writers were stooping to the kind of material that delights the in-studio watchers and leaves us at home out of the loop. The most obvious offenders in this regard are when Leno or Letterman will come out and lead-off with a line that plays back on something that was said in the pre-show warm-up. Big laugh from all those present but a big "?" to us. I suspect that some programs — M*A*S*H would be the best example — would not have been as good had the authors had to constantly think of evoking that audible response from a studio audience.

Maybe the best thing would be if we could learn to laugh at comedies on an individual basis. Anyway, let's note a moment of hysterics for Charlie Douglass…

Bob Edwards is the host of Morning Edition on National Public Radio. He has some interesting thoughts on the press today, particularly with the slanting of news to further the business interests of the company that owns the reporting venue. You'll find it here.

As mentioned back on the old news from me, DC Comics is bringing out the first of two paperback volumes reprinting Jack Kirby's brief but highly memorable tenure on Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. It was an odd stint — not quite a DC comic, not quite a Marvel, with art that was not quite Jack's, and stories that no one could quite describe. As I recount in the foreword of the book, Jack never much liked handling other folks' characters. On the other hand, he was newly-arrived at DC, having fled a situation he deemed intolerable at Marvel. He was eager to cooperate with his new employer and eager to become its most important creator.

To this end, he accepted the notion not only that he should do something in the Superman area but that he should also revamp the Man of Steel, whose sales were dropping and whose long-time editor had just been shown the door. That character's pal's comic, which was then without a steady writer or artist, looked like a dandy place to begin to do some of that.

As others have found over the years with a classic icon, it's one thing for the copyright holder to say they want it updated and retooled, and quite another for them (anyone, not just DC then) to actually alter a property with a lucrative merchandising franchise. I am reminded of a time when a writer I know described a new assignment as, "Make it new, make it fresh, make it different, but for God's sake, don't change anything!"

What Jack did with Jimmy Olsen came to rest somewhere in the middle of that directive: Different enough from the DC norm to horrify several of the company's longtime staffers (including the nominal editor of the comic, Murray Boltinoff) but so much like a DC Comic that Jack felt distanced from the work and generally handicapped. Nothing that he did was without interest, and some of what you'll see in this collection — and the subsequent second volume, which will reprint the balance of his Olsen material — is quite wonderful. This is a 192 page paperback that comes out on July 23. Yes, it's in color. No, the retouches that were done at the time on Jack's drawings of Jimmy Olsen and Superman have not been undone. The cover is Steve Rude's reinterpretation of an unused cover drawing Jack did. You can see a small version of it above left and a larger one by clicking here. I think. I'm still learning how to embed pictures in this new software, so don't be surprised if you click that link and wind up at some porn site.

You can read an interview with Harry Shearer here at The Onion. Or you can listen to an interview with Harry Shearer here on National Public Radio. Or you can do neither.

Just fixed a configuration glitch that was letting about half of you get to this page and sending the other half of you scurrying back to my other site, no matter how hard you tried to get here. My apologies to that half of you, but now you have a wonderful metaphor for life.

Here's a link to Senator Rick Santorum's recent comments on homosexuality. Frightening.

Jason Alexander and Martin Short are not only going to star in The Producers in Los Angeles, they've already stepped into the roles of Bialystock and Bloom for the current San Francisco engagement. Meanwhile, cast members are being rotated between that company, the Broadway engagement, and some new productions. Here's an article that will tell you who's where and who's going to be where.

Well. This new page seems to be working okay…from my end, anyway. No doubt I'll awake tomorrow to an e-mail from some old friend saying that he's viewing the Internet on a steam-fitted Etch-a-Sketch and that my new website doesn't read properly on his screen. Bear with me a few days and I'll get the software cleaned up.

As noted in the margins here, I still have POVonline up and operating. I wanted to stop hand-coding its "news" page and switch to this software, and it seemed neater to set it up at its own address with its own web directories and such. So that's why the new site. Hope you enjoy it. Not that I do this for anyone but myself…

Demon broadcaster Paul Harris has a terrific Flash movie over on his "Picture of the Day" page at www.harrisonline.com.  Here's a link to that page, and you'll want to select the Honda Accord commercial.

Actually, several of the things Paul has posted there are fun but we're recommending the Honda commercial as a special must-see.  It's two minutes, it's amazing and it's apparently all real.  Read the articles Paul has posted about how the film was made, then watch it again.  Somewhere, Rube Goldberg is smiling.

Sorry to hear of the passing of the great jazz/gospel singer Nina Simone.  Here's a link to the New York Times obit which just begins to tell her amazing, courageous story.  Of course, no article could properly summarize her music but fortunately, we have CDs for that.  I was honored to attend one of her last American concerts in July of 2001 and it was a wonderful experience.  If she hadn't finally left the stage, we'd all still be standing and cheering.

For reasons that you wouldn't care less about, I'm trying to identify two novelty songs I heard as a kid.  Though I have an immense collection of silly records and comedy albums, these two tunes have eluded me.  Don't know who recorded them, don't know their real names.  I'm going to describe as much of them as I remember in the hope that some visitor to this site will go, "Oh, I know what that is," and drop me an e-mail.  Keep in mind that I haven't heard either of these songs in about forty years…

Song #1 is called something like "The Average Giraffe."  A male chorus sings all sorts of little statistics about giraffes. The last line, I'm pretty sure, goes: "So be glad, my friend / And be grateful no end / You're not the average giraffe."

Sound familiar?  No?  Well then, let's move on to the other one…

Song #2 is called something like "How To Make A Hit Record" and I'm pretty sure I saw Jerry Lewis doing a lip-sync to it on some show around 1960.  A male voice sings about how he figured out what he needs to make a big hit.  At one point, he sings, "…so I got me a group" and back-up singers chime in with, "Yeah, yeah / Yeah, yeah."  And then the male singer continues, "Then the band comes along / That's all / That's all / That's all / That's all / That's all I need — to make a hit record."

Ring any bells?  Aw, shucks.  Well, maybe somebody can identify them. And no, I wasn't lying awake 'til this hour trying to think of them.

Great thing about the internet: You can post a question at 4:15 in the morning, go to bed, get up and there — in your mailbox along with the ads for penis enlargement and guaranteed credit cards — is your answer.

Mike Zeidler informs me that "The Average Giraffe" was released by the Four Lads on Columbia Records #40490 but doesn't seem to be available on CD.  And "Hit Record" was recorded in 1962 by Brook Benton (Mercury #71962) and is on this CD.  Time-stamped about four minutes later was Ed Golick's message with the Brook Benton I.D.  Thanks, Mike and Ed!

They've released the DVD of the 1985 movie version of A Chorus Line.  I was going to write a long piece here about the many ways in which the movie corrupts and/or misses the point  of the original, classic Broadway show but I don't have to.  Theater expert Ken Mandelbaum took most of the words right out of my mouth.  Here's a link to his article.

I agree with everything he says, but I'd add two more flaws.  One is that the cinematography of the film often works against a proper viewing of the dances.  At least in the theater where I saw it, there were shots where the dancers' feet were awkwardly cropped and others where the cutting interrupted the flow of movement, or cut against the beat.  (A dancer friend of mine commented that the choreography was probably a lot better than you can tell on the screen.)

Secondly, the premise of the "Tits and Ass" number is that the dancer in question wasn't getting jobs before she had those two parts of her body adjusted via surgery.  Before that, casting folks rated her looks at "3" on a scale of one to ten, ten being best.  It was augmentation of her chest and buttocks that made her attractive because she was not otherwise attractive.  Therefore, you cast someone with a rather plain face.  You don't cast Audrey Landers who is naturally and movie-star gorgeous just from the neck up. (In spite of that, she was terrific. I've seen Audrey for years and I doubt there's a role anywhere near her age range that she couldn't play.)

Also, down below, you'll note that I recently read the autobiography of the great Broadway producer, Cy Feuer.  One of the few big failings of Mr. Feuer's career was that he produced the movie of A Chorus Line.  It's interesting that in the book, he admits the failing, and says that Michael Bennett (the primary creator of the original play) advised him not to allow the movie to focus on the love story between Zack and Cassie.  Feuer says this was very good advice and he wishes he'd followed it.  So do we all.

I don't recommend this movie but if you're going to buy it, click here to order it from Amazon and give us a small cut. Or if it's on cable, just catch the number with Audrey.

Amazon.com says that the DVD of Bob Fosse's All That Jazz is finally coming out…in August.  No, I don't know what took them so long, either.  But you can click here to pre-order it from Amazon