Once upon a time on this site, I recommended McAfee's virus-checking programs.  Let the record show that the McAfee people have "improved" their Active Shield product a number of times in the last year and, with each "improvement," it gets slower and clunkier and more likely to crash my system.  Ergo, Active Shield is no longer on my system.  No McAfee product is.  I've switched over to Norton Anti-Virus and, so far, it's working great.

If you don't have a virus-checker installed, you should.  And if you do have one, you oughta know about a tiny program called eicar.com.  This is a perfectly harmless fake virus that was written to test virus-checkers.  You can download it here…and if you run it and it doesn't trigger your virus-checker, you ain't got no protection.

Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick will only be in The Producers for another week or so, and there have been no reports of professional videotaping of the show with them in it.  One assumes either or both will return whenever the grosses start to drop.  Still, it's a shame that this first incarnation is not being recorded for posterity.

It is well-publicized that Mr. Lane has not been playing matinees, so folks who showed up for yesterday's afternoon performance expected to see his splendid (from all reports) replacement, Brad Oscar.  Much to their surprise, Nathan was up there playing Bialystock — apparently because Mr. and Mrs. George Bush, Sr. were in attendance.  Here's a link to a newsgroup message by someone who was there that day.

My longtime pal Tony Isabella just gave me the following nice plug in his online column, which you can read at www.wfcomics.com/tony:

I visit there almost every day and it's not just because Mark has those risqué pictures of me with Jennifer Connelly. At least Mark told me the woman was Jennifer Connelly. That was the year I was hanging out with George W. Bush and, to be honest, most of it is an alcoholic haze.

Tony, I hate to break this to you but that wasn't Jennifer Connelly.  That was Billy Connolly.  Here…perhaps this will explain it for you:

That's Jennifer on the left and Billy on the right.  In case you get this confused in the future, Tony, here's a handy way to tell them apart: Billy only wears one earring and he has been known to speak with a Scottish accent.  Also, I should admit that I burned all the photos of you and Billy because, quite frankly, they were making me ill.  Especially the ones with the lima beans and the gecko.

Speaking of comic character figurines — as we often do 'round these parts — here's a pic of the prototype of the forthcoming Groo figure.  This will be part of the PVC set coming out in May from Dark Horse, which features not only Groo and Rufferto but also statues of Sage and Mulch (together), Arba and Dakarba (separate), Minstrel, Taranto and Chakaal.  They're about four inches tall and cute as all get out and, like I said, this is a prototype.  His jersey is actually more of a yellow-orange than it may appear in this pic and Sergio has asked to give this guy a bit more of a scowl.  Still, didn't the sculptors — who are somewhere in China, I believe — do a great job?  And how'd you like to have to paint all them spots on the dog?  2002 marks the 20th anniversary of our idiot barbarian, of whom it was once said, "This comic will never last."  We have a few Groo special projects for which we'll try and soak you before the year is out, including a special book of rarely-seen Groo stories and sketches.  Happy Groo Year to you all.

We're sticking with our prediction that David Letterman will keep his show at CBS.  Actually, everybody who's predicting seems to be sticking with that prediction, so it probably won't happen.  Nevertheless, we also have a prediction as to who CBS will go after for the slot if they lose Dave, which they won't unless they do.  Matt Drudge is reporting that Howard Stern is at the top of a short list, so that's probably not true.  Jon Stewart's name has been mentioned but, though I think Stewart is brilliant, I can't believe anyone thinks he could survive a three-way race against Dave and Jay.  He's out of the same school of comedy and the other two guys have already carved up that audience and developed loyal followings.  So my guess is that Stewart would be a little ways down on that list and Stern would be even lower.

What CBS would want there is someone young and capable of doing an entertainment show but whose style and audience didn't overlap so much with Leno and Letterman.  And if he's going to attract advertisers and big stars, the host would have to be enough of a star himself that he would instantly be accepted as a contender.

I haven't seen his name mentioned anywhere for this and I have no idea if he'd do it.  But if it comes down to CBS having to offer the 11:35 time slot to someone else — which it won't, unless it does — I suspect the first call would be to whoever represents Chris Rock.

In 1971, Jack Kirby was writing and drawing a new creation, The Forever People, for DC Comics.  As is not uncommon among writers, Jack based just about everything he did on either people and events in his own life or those he saw on the news.  At times, the connections were obvious.  At other times, his reference points were so disguised that, even when he told me what he thought he was writing about, I could see no trace of it in the finished product.  He also did composites.  The master villain of Forever People (and its allied titles, New Gods, Mister Miracle and, for a time, Jimmy Olsen) was Darkseid — who was not based on then-President Nixon but a number of Nixon's traits, speeches and actions did inform the character.

A lesser villain who toiled in the service of Darkseid was inspired more directly by evangelist Billy Graham, who was then rather difficult to avoid on TV.  Kirby was appalled at some of Graham's apocalyptic sermons which — to Jack — were more calculated to instill fear than faith, and to stampede people into service of Graham's causes.  Jack called the foe Glorious Godfrey, the name being a Kirbyesque pun.  The comic book evangelist was "god-free" and also had some of the traits of TV pitchman Arthur Godfrey, though the main reference and the visual came from Billy Graham.  Not evident in on the pages he drew was Jack's belief — which he expressed on several occasions — that Graham and the president he counseled were both virulent anti-Semites.

A year or two ago in some interview or article, I mentioned that Jack based Glorious Godfrey on Billy Graham, and I mentioned it over in our Jack F.A.Q. section, as well.  This disclosure prompted a number of e-mails and letters from folks who said they had great respect for Rev. Graham and were shocked that Jack Kirby did not.  I explained to them that Graham's current style is quite different from the fire-and-brimstone doomsday preaching he did in the early seventies…and that while Jack might appreciate how the act has been toned down, I believe he would stand by his opinion of Billy Graham, circa 1971.

I was therefore fascinated — though perhaps unsurprised — at recent revelations from the fabled Nixon tapes.  As you can read here, Graham can be heard on several newly-released recordings from the first six months of 1972.  In them, he and Nixon are discussing their mutual distrust of Jews in high places, especially in the media.  It is exactly the kind of thing Kirby believed of the two men.  His view of them was, like his view of just about everyone and everything, right on target.

By the way: I've never quite understood the claim that the Jews control the media.  I'm Jewish and I can just barely control my TiVo.

Here's a one-line summary of last evening's Salute to Fred Allen at the Museum of Television and Radio.  Nine very witty men got together to watch clips and to discuss another very witty man named Fred Allen.  The nine gents were Stuart Canin, Dick Cavett, Norman Corwin, Larry Gelbart, Stuart Hample, Hal Kanter, Norman Lear, Dick Martin and Herman Wouk.  A few knew Fred and had the honor of working with him.  Others were just fans from afar.  All had good stories and insights and historical information and (especially) quotes of clever Allen remarks.  Wouk is, of course, best known as the author of serious, award-winning dramatic novels.  Hard to believe — but true — that he was once a comedy writer for Fred Allen.

Stuart Hample is an author-cartoonist who compiled All the Sincerity in Hollywood: Selections From The Writing of Fred Allen, a fine book you can purchase by clicking on its name here.  The other folks, you probably know of…though Canin's name may be unfamiliar.  As you may be aware, Fred Allen enjoyed a very famous fake feud with Jack Benny that commenced one evening in 1936 when Allen had a 10-year-old violinist on his program.  The young man played a stirring rendition of "The Bee," and then the host commented, "Jack Benny oughta be ashamed of himself."  Well, Stuart Canin — now an important concertmaster — was that 10-year-old boy.

He told of his experiences, Lear, Kanter and Gelbart talked about their encounters with Allen, Cavett spoke of listening to the shows in Nebraska and then, when he first came to New York, exchanging but a few words with the man outside a What's My Line? broadcast.  There were a lot of very funny Allen quotes, many of them almost poetic in their beauty, some so familiar to us from repetition that they seem like clichés until you realize that, when Fred first said them, they were fresh.  Here are a couple of my faves…

You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart.

A molehill man is a pseudo-busy executive who comes to work at 9 AM and finds a molehill on his desk.  He has until 5 PM to make this molehill into a mountain.  An accomplished molehill man will often have his mountain finished before lunch.

Fred Allen was one of the cleverest men ever on radio but he never quite found a niche on television, which was a shame.  When he died, Groucho was quoted as saying there were only two wits on TV — Fred Allen and Steve Allen and now, with Fred gone, television was half-witted.  Steve's gone now, and the joke still applies.

I don't know how many of you noticed it but it was on the news that actress Shirley Jones has filed for divorce from her husband of 25 years, Marty Ingels.  Asked what had prompted the action, Ms. Jones replied, "I woke up one morning and realized that I was married to Marty Ingels."

Okay, we're plugging a friend's book here…a very lovely, wordless collection of sketches by my pal Michael Paraskevas.  Mickey (as we call him) is a brilliant cartoonist and illustrator whose work has been featured in dozens of fine books, most of them written by his mother Betty, ostensibly for children.  I'd recommend them all to you — especially Junior Kroll — but right now, I'm suggesting L.A. Times, a new paperback collection of doodles from his frequent trips to Los Angeles.  His style is unique and his "eye" for capturing the essence of all the purveys is uncanny.  Like many artists, he carried around one of the bound books of drawing paper and captures whatever catches his attention.  This self-published volume is a faithful reproduction of a sketchbook I saw him filling up on his visits out here, and it's great to have a copy of it I can call my own.  Click here to order a copy.

(If you're in L.A., you can see a lot of Mickey's work exhibited over at the Storyopolis Gallery over on Robertson Blvd.)  If you click on the picture, you and your credit card will be whisked over to Amazon where you can buy this splendid book — or anything else they have there — warmed by the knowledge that a teensy percentage of your purchase is going to this site. Bless you.

I know what you've been waiting for with baited breath.  And I'm pleased to announce that I've just noticed that www.irwincorey.com is open for business.  The World's Foremost Authority has a whole website full of photos and routines and silly stuff — and it's surprisingly coherent, even if he isn't.  It also tells us that he's appearing Sunday nights at a comedy club in New York and, if he's still doing that when next I go East, I intend to go see him.  I recall him being very funny on talk shows and even funny in movies where no one else was funny.  I suspect though he's way too spontaneous for what passes for a talk show these days.

What does your first name mean?  Find out here.

How we love a tale of apparent network screw-ups.  I always felt that too much was made of seeming incompetence in the Letterman/Leno nastiness that formed the basis of the book and movie, The Late Shift.  Soon after the latter came out, I was at a party where a network guy — someone who'd had zero to do with it — started in on how inept NBC had been in the handling of the changeover.  On and on he went until someone asked, "Okay, what would you have done?"

And then it got a little messy because I knew the story pretty well and, every time the network guy said what he'd have done, I corrected the details.  He'd say, "Well, I would have told Dave this…" and I'd jump in and remind him, "But at that point, Johnny was saying this."  To which he'd respond, "Oh.  Well, then I would have had Jay do that" and I'd say, "But at that point, Jay's contract said this."  And on and on.  The gent couldn't come up with any concrete action he would have taken, other than what was actually done, without rearranging the reality of the situation.

After about 20 minutes, he finally said, "Well, I would have treated everyone better," which of course meant that he couldn't even quarterback on Monday morning.  Even with hindsight — knowing that which the players did not know at the time — he couldn't come up with a workable Plan B.

I dunno how the current Letterman/Koppel scuffle is going to play out.  My guess right this minute is that Dave stays at CBS, Koppel limps along at ABC for a time while they look for a replacement and a more graceful way to ease him out of the time slot, and Bill Maher goes elsewhere for a much better deal.  But regardless of the outcome, this dust-up strikes me as a clearer example of TV executives bungling negotiations.  It probably won't spawn a book or a movie with a guy in a bad wig playing Dave…but this one seems sillier because it was so unnecessary.  There had to be an eventual war over who'd replace Johnny because, sooner or later, Johnny had to leave.  But trying to bring in Letterman to replace Koppel now is just a matter of greed.  Nightline is, despite what some anonymous person claimed to The New York Times, profitable.  It's not as profitable as Letterman would probably be in that position but you can't lose money with a news show that comes in second in its time slot.

Someone oughta remind the boys at Disney that this mistake was made before in ABC late night.  Back when Dick Cavett was opposite Johnny Carson, he put on an award-winning, well-respected show that did a lot to counter the schlock image of so much else the company was then airing.  It also finished a respectable second to Johnny and made money.  Somehow, this was not enough for the folks then in charge of the alphabet network.  They reduced Cavett from every night to one week a month, folding him into a rotating format that included specials and the second coming of Jack Paar.  They called it ABC's Wide World of Entertainment but they might as well have named it The Golden Goose because they slaughtered a profitable enterprise and wound up with bupkis.  Paar bombed, Cavett was destroyed, the specials flopped.  Their whole late night franchise collapsed and for years they derived neither cash nor prestige after 11:30 until, at long last, they garnered some of each by handing the time slot over to — wait for it — Ted Koppel.

History will not repeat itself precisely, especially if Letterman does go to ABC.  He'd probably do as well there as he has on CBS, especially if CBS doesn't come up with a strong replacement.  (The primary benefit to his ratings would not come from demographics or lead-ins.  It would come from the elimination of Nightline.  I don't think Letterman would even be considering the move if he thought CBS had a promising option for his slot.)  But the more likely scenario is that he'll stay where he is and the whole negotiation will merely have forced ABC to frag Koppel and Maher before they were ready.  That strikes me as a lot dumber than anything surrounding the sturm und drang of who'd get to sit behind Johnny's desk.

As I write this, we are an hour or so from going over 100,000 distinct hits since this website went up.  I still don't know quite how this is tallied.  If you log in twice in the same day, you're still one hit.  And of course, if you stay here for hours reading things, you're one hit but if you surf through and leave in two seconds because there's no porn, you're one hit.  Whatever, it's nice that we have an audience and I thank those of you who've visited and helped publicize this silly, non-profitable concern.  I'll be putting up more content beyond this page in a week or three when I get past some flaming deadlines.  Bye now.

Two quickies, then I have to get back to the deadlines and social obligations I mentioned in the previous post…

My cousin David has an article in today's New York Times about his strange relationship with his psychiatrist.  Click here to read a nice piece by the other writing Evanier.

And thanks to all of you who sent birthday greetings and I'm sorry I haven't had time to respond.  Yes, yesterday I hit the big five-oh and, no, it didn't bother me one bit.  I long ago decided that it wasn't me; that the entire world is now going through a mid-life crisis.

Back to stuff.

Spoke today to a couple of folks who are in and around the Late Night Teevee Biz.  They reinforced a lot of what was said in the previous item, and the consensus seems to be that a Letterman move to ABC is a longshot.  This evening on The Newshour With Jim Lehrer, Bill Carter himself only pegged the likelihood at around 20% — which makes one wonder if the story even deserved the prominence it was given.  One person who seems to have inside info gave me a likely-sounding theory to answer my question, "Why is this in the paper?"  The theory is that Letterman's people were worried that it would leak in the form of, "Dave — who once tried his damnedest to get Jay Leno fired — is now going after Ted Koppel."

By releasing the story as they did, they made certain it included the spin that ABC is considering the dumping of Koppel anyway…which is "sorta" true but is apparently far from a done deal.  My source says ABC would be a lot happier if Mr. Koppel took fewer evenings off and if Nightline did more to woo younger viewers. If he won't do either, and if a real good alternative presents itself, Nightline would probably be history, at least in its present form and time slot.

But it's not a goner because, among other reasons, that real good alternative ain't there.  Nightline has been getting around the same ratings as Letterman, though with a less desirable demographic.  That's not great for ABC but the show is by no means a disaster, and claims that it and Politically Incorrect are losing millions are probably grossly exaggerated.  Both would have been axed long ago if that were literally true, as their ratings have not notably declined the last few years, nor have they become markedly more expensive.  (P.I. has a separate, unrelated set of problems.  Some affiliates don't like its contents or feel it belongs on their network.)

Today, some message boards are erupting with suggestions that Jon Stewart* or some other prominent comedian will get the 11:35 slot on ABC or CBS — wherever Letterman doesn't wind up.  In truth, it's not that simple.  You don't cancel a show like Nightline — with 4.5 million viewers — until you've got a replacement that you're reasonably confident will draw at least that many.  At the moment, of all the conceivable contenders, Letterman is the only one with any track record in that time slot.  Jon Stewart might do as well…but I doubt anyone in the TV biz, including Mr. Stewart, would bet their condos on that if they could avoid it.  For the same reason, CBS will probably settle with Dave…who can't be all that eager to uproot a secure show that has been slowly gaining in the ratings and move it to alien turf and its inevitable uncertainties.

To answer a couple of questions…

One correspondent wrote to ask, "If Letterman does wind up at ABC, wouldn't Koppel just take Nightline to CBS?"  Nope.  First off, Koppel might go elsewhere but he doesn't own the show.  Secondly, CBS has launched its first-ever successful entertainment franchise in that slot and isn't about to abandon that.  Thirdly, if they did want a news show in that position, it would be a major slap in the face of the CBS News Division to fish one out of a competitor's wastebasket.

Another asked if being on ABC at 11:35 was that much of a ratings benefit over being on CBS?  Answer: No, not all that much.  Yes, ABC currently has stronger lead-ins but that could change rapidly…and anyway, during part of the year, Monday Night Football bumps the 11:35 show into a non-competitive position in many markets, one night a week.  Letterman would have to come up with a new studio from which to broadcast (he'd almost certainly stay in New York) and move his offices and figure out what he wants to have follow him at 12:35, et cetera, et cetera.  It's a helluva lot of work and risk for what might be a slight advantage…and might not.

I've gotta run but first, this footnote:

* I think Jon Stewart is one of the most brilliant host-type comedians working today.  I'm off now to attend a tribute to The Daily Show at the Museum of Television and Radio.  If I get a chance, I'll post a report here later about the event and what, if anything, is said about the above.  Bye!