So our president is watching a football game on TV and he chokes on a pretzel and faints for four seconds.  Could have happened to anybody.  My question is: Why do we know this?  Why did the White House — which has not exactly been a gusher of candor regarding, say, who was on Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force, feel that this had to be reported?

I looked through several news stories and all I find were a few remarks that they announced it because, recently, the office was criticized for not promptly reporting when Bush had some skin cancers removed from his face.  This strikes me as someone groping for an explanation.  To the extent there was such criticism, it was minor.  Remember, Bush is still sitting on that awesome approval rating and Americans overwhelmingly don't care about most issues unrelated to terrorism and the economy.  The skin cancer was also something that, since it was on the man's face, would eventually have been noticed…or perhaps the fact that the president had undergone surgery would have leaked, and the rumor mill would have thought it was something more serious.  But in the case of l'affaire pretzel, there was no visit to a hospital and the president only suffered a few scratches and bruises which could have been explained a hundred different, less embarrassing ways.  Would anyone have screamed "Cover up" if they hadn't reported the fainting and it subsequently got out?  My theory is that someone said, "You know, Leno and Letterman have stopped ridiculing Bush since 9/11.  Let's give the boys a break and tell them about this because it'll give them a chance to jab him without looking like they're sabotaging the war effort."  Because, as far as I can see, they're the only ones to benefit.

I have nothing to do with Cool and Strange Music Magazine and don't even think I know anyone who does.  But it covers a lot of the same aberrations that one finds on this website.  So if you've found your way here, you might enjoy this publication as much as I do.  The current issue features a good overview of Mel Blanc's many kids' records, plus features on Gary Owens, Brother Theodore, Thurl "Tony the Tiger" Ravenscroft and many others…and every issue has had something that I found of interest.  They post very little of their content on the web but don't let that stop you.  Spend money for a subscription.  (You can do that on the web.  Here's a link to their website.)

Members of old comedy duos are dropping like flies.  First, Avery Schreiber and now, Frank Shuster — who was one half of the comedy team of Wayne and Shuster.  (In the picture above, Shuster's the one on the right.  Wayne, seen at left, passed away in 1990)  In Canada, they were major stars.  In this country, they were best known for their 67 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, wherein they performed very silly — and often, very elaborate — comedy sketches.  They also starred in a short-lived 1961 summer situation comedy on CBS called Holiday Lodge, in which they played two guys who botched up the running of a vacation hotel.  Though it failed, they probably could have been very big in America had they opted to work here more.  They didn't, preferring to avoid high pressure situations and to remain in their native Canada.  I never saw an example of it, but rumor is that a couple of American comedy shows took advantage of this to liberally borrow ideas from the boys.

Mr. Shuster's family ties may also be of some interest to those interested in American popular culture.  His daughter Rosie was one of the key writers of the first generation of Saturday Night Live and was briefly married to its producer, Lorne Michaels.  And Frank Shuster also had a cousin named Joe who, with a friend named Jerry Siegel, created a little thing called Superman.

I haven't seen anything on Shuster's passing in the U.S. wire services but here's a link to a story in the Canadian press.

Nick Cardy is about as fine a comic artist as has ever worked in the field and I gush all over him in the foreword to The Art of Nick Cardy, a superb work published a couple of years ago by John Coates.  The print run sold out right away but Vanguard Press has brought it back into print.  It's a loving biography and art book devoted to a lovely man who's done a lot of lovely comic book pages.  Many of them are reproduced within and make the point far better than I can.  As I said in the book, Nick was always topping himself.  We thought his Aquaman was great until we saw his Teen Titans.  Then we thought his Teen Titans was great until we saw his Bat Lash…and so on.

Bat Lash, which was co-written by my amigo, Sergio Aragonés, may have set some record for being the best-remembered comic with the fewest number of issues.  It came and went in an instant — six or seven issues, I forget — due to reportedly low sales.  (I am of the opinion that the comic book industry has often been too quick to cancel something new when it didn't catch on immediately.)  In the case of Bat Lash, it looks like everyone who bought the book loved it, remembered it and — when Nick came out to be a guest of honor at the ComicCon International in San Diego — they all lined up to tell him how much they loved it.  You probably can't find a complete set of Bat Lash — I have one and you don't, nyah nyah — but you can and should buy The Art of Nick Cardy.

On January 22, A&E Biography is airing a program called Laugh Out Loud, which — well, here.  I'll let you read it for yourself…

We polled over 250 comedians, journalists, and academies to find out which TV comedians made them laugh over the years and which had the most influence on television comedy today. The result is their list of the 15 greatest TV comedians of all time. We won't reveal the list until the program airs, but we can tell you it will be full of hilarious clips showing our legendary comedians at their best.

I always think these "best" polls are silly and arbitrary and that folks take them way too seriously.  But one of my spies sent me a list that purports to be the fifteen funny folks that the poll chose and I have to admit, it ain't a bad list for what it is…

Steve Allen, Lucille Ball, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Carol Burnett, Sid Caesar, Johnny Carson, Bill Cosby, Jackie Gleason, Bob Hope, Ernie Kovacs, Steve Martin, Groucho Marx, Richard Pryor, Robin Williams

Assuming this is indeed their list, I can't argue with too many inclusions or omissions, except possibly that I don't think of Mssrs. Pryor or Martin as really having done their strongest work on TV.  Had it just been me deciding, I'd have bumped them for Bob Newhart, Dick Van Dyke, Phil Silvers or one or two other guys.  I might also have argued that Jonathan Winters has been both funnier and more influential than Robin Williams and that Jackie Gleason's greatest contribution to televised humor was hiring Art Carney.  But all in all, it's not a bad list.  I have another list of great comedians that some friends of mine and I compiled once, and I'll post it here in a week or two.

Up over nine million.  This is getting exciting.

This is kinda interesting. On January 3, an eBay seller called "xtci" posted a listing for 92 comics — most of them, #1 issues — with a minimum bid of eight million dollars.  That's right.  I said eight million dollars.  Let me type that one more time, real slow, so we all understand what we're talking about:  Eight.  Million.  Dollars.

Of the 92 comics, three are genuine treasures — Action Comics #1, Detective Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27.  Or, at least, they would be treasures if the issues being offered were genuine.  The evidence suggests they are not.  The listing includes photos of the Action #1 and Detective #27 — both in cheap plastic bags, both looking an awful lot like facsimile editions that have been issued in recent years.  (There is no photo of the Detective Comics #1.  There has also been no facsimile edition that, in a picture, would look even vaguely like the genuine article.)  The other #1 issues being offered are all fairly recent and not at all of the same scarcity.

Over on www.comicon.com, the offering is the subject of much derisive chatter.  A couple of the folks there have done some math.  One figures that, if the three vintage issues were genuine and in excellent condition, the value of the whole magilla would be a little under $600,000.  That's going by the Overstreet Price Guide.  Take away the three classics and the rest of the stash is worth less than twelve grand by any measure, possibly a lot less.

So, you figure, this thing is never going to get any bids, right?  Wrong.  At the moment, as I write this, bidding is up to $8,000,300..  A couple of other bids have been made and retracted.  Folks are bidding just to go along with the joke and perhaps to tweak the nose of "xtci" or something.

What I find intriguing about this is to wonder what was on the seller's mind.  Obviously, he couldn't have thought there was a chance in hell that anyone would bid eight million bucks for this bundle — especially sight-unseen, buying from a person who has no history on eBay.  So it's a joke, right?  (It only cost him $3.30 to list it, plus the time and trouble.)  But why eight million?  How did he come up with that figure?  Why not fifty million?  The joke would have been greater and the chances of selling, the same.  Or if he thought there was a zillion-in-one chance that some addled billionaire would bid, why eight?  Why not seven?  Or five?  There'd be a helluva profit in one million, even if he had to go out and buy real copies of the three Golden Age issues to fill the order.

The auction is set to close January 13 if eBay allows it to go the distance, which they may not.  If you want to check on its status — or maybe even put in a bid — the link is right here.  Frankly, I might pay six million but eight is ridiculous.

And some people just seem to born to draw.  It poured out of John Buscema, a lovely man who passed away this morning following a long, brutal bout with cancer.  John was best known as the man who did it all at Marvel from the mid-sixties right into the nineties: Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Thor, Silver Surfer, Tales of the Zombie, Sub-Mariner…wherever they needed him.  He hated the character but, when they didn't have anyone else who could draw Spider-Man, he drew Spider-Man.  Matter of fact, John hated most super-hero strips…but he was of a time in comics when that didn't matter much.  So he drew an awful lot of them.

He was happiest during his many years drawing Conan the Barbarian…and frustrated, as we all should have been, that the exigencies of production rarely allowed him to do finished art.  When he did, he was wonderful…and even the main body of his work, doing pencils or "breakdowns" (half-finished pencils) for others showed a solid, dependable craftsman at work.  His heroic figures had strength and stock, his beautiful women were truly that, and other artists stood in awe of how naturally it all seemed to flow out of him.

He was a guest of honor at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego and I got to chat with him on four panels, one of them a lengthy one-on-one.  He struck me as enormously conflicted about his work — proud of all he had done, regretful that so much of it was spent on strips he didn't like, doing half a job that would be finished by someone else.  He belittled most of his work and, in some instances, had the audience booing in disagreement.  I think that's because he knew that The System didn't usually allow him to do his best.  But the fans still loved him because, after all, John Buscema not at his best was still better than most artists at the top of their games.

I'm so embarrassed to be (apparently) the only professional writer in America who has not been plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose.  And on the subject of such crimes, let me relate one quick anecdote…

Years ago, a team of comedy writers caught a show I'd written on TV and realized that it had almost the exact same plot — and even many of the same jokes — as a show they'd written.  Leaping into high dudgeon, they engaged a lawyer who dispatched a highly-outraged letter to the producer of my show.  In grueling detail, it itemized similarities — so many, it concluded, that coincidence was inconceivable.  The only rational explanation was that I had shamelessly and without question seen their show and copied down its every word to palm off as my own.  The letter concluded by noting that theirs had been conceived, written and aired a full eight months before mine and, therefore, I had "more than ample time" to pull off this daring, daylight burglary.

The producer of my show wrote back a terse note, which was basically a cover letter to what he enclosed.  It was a copy of a CBS program log that he'd highlighted to note that the episode of mine they'd seen was a rerun from two years earlier.  Mine had, in fact, aired four times by the date they said they'd written theirs.

From their lawyer thereafter, there was silence.  From the writers eventually came a personal note saying that they'd fired that rotten attorney who had insisted on sending that inexcusable letter.  There was, obviously, no similarity between the shows.

That does not seem to be the case with Mr. Ambrose's lifts.  I think the reasons his have the press so intrigued are that, first of all, they can't seem to figure out how anyone — Ambrose or some ghost-writer, if that was the culprit — thought he could get away with it.  Stealing from an obscure source in the belief that no one will ever see where you got it is, at least, a bit understandable.  Stealing from a book you acknowledge as a reference is like telling everyone where you hid the weapon and hoping they don't notice there's been a murder.  Ambrose's "crime" seemed so illogical that the early theory seems to have been the ghost-writer one; that it was perpetrated by someone who knew his own name would not get tarnished and perhaps wished to embarrass his employer.  As further instances of theft come to light, the Ghost-Writer Explanation seems increasingly less likely.

The second reason it all has reporters so up-in-arms and paying attention is that they can't believe this wasn't exposed long ago.  But then, most of them didn't know before September 11th that the Taliban wasn't a new model of Chevrolet…

• Enron As Whitewater by Jacob Weisberg, Slate
• It's All Bill Clinton's Fault by Gene Lyons, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Real pundits – the kind folks listen to, whether they should or not – all seem to be predicting that our President's new "over my dead body" tax pledge will bite him in the behind as "read my lips" harmed his father.  Perhaps.  My own suspicion is that the idea here is not to not raise taxes but to make sure that, if and when taxes are raised, Bush can blame it on the Democrats.  I seem to recall that when Ronald Reagan was governor of California, one of his aides — presumably, a disgruntled, former one — told reporters that Reagan's fondest wish was for a huge tax increase (which he got) to be passed with his hands clean (which he didn't quite manage).

In any case, here's a thought: The two times that the older George Bush ran for the White House, he somehow got away with a very fuzzy definition of "tax increases."  It didn't seem to matter how much a tax increase was or even how many folks it applied to; it was the number of tax increases.  If the Dukakis or Clinton administrations had instituted five one-dollar fees on a few denizens of their states, that was FIVE TAX INCREASES, whereas if a Republican administration presided over one huge one that affected everyone, that was only ONE TAX INCREASE.  For some reason, a certain amount of Americans never got past the concept that five tax increases are always worse than one.

What's more — and this is the thing that could give our present Chief Exec some woes if anyone ever makes a big issue of it — his father defined any government-mandated collection of money as a tax increase.  Somewhere, there's videotape of him arguing that a new "booking fee" that was being charged to folks who were arrested was a TAX INCREASE; that a two-dollar license fee for greyhound racing was a TAX INCREASE, etc.  There were many of those and, if one buys his definition, then the current Bush Administration is already planning several.  The new "security fee" — or whatever they wind up calling it — that one will pay when one boards an airplane is certainly a TAX INCREASE by the definition that the last Bush campaigns sold to the country.  I thought that definition was hooey then.  I suspect that if anyone tries to apply it today, both George Bushes will feel likewise.  (Not that I expect anyone to mention it.  We always seem to let politicians skate on this kind of thing…)

This morning, I attended the unveiling ceremony/press conference for the new poster with which the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is promoting this year's Oscars.  The poster was painted by Alex Ross, who has been dazzling folks in the comic book industry with his paintings…particularly with his ability to take characters designed in simple line and to render them in fully-painted, three-dimensional splendor, as he did in Marvels, Kingdom Come and some recent special albums of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman.  I couldn't help but marvel, not just at a "comic book" promoting an artist to this status (especially at a time when comics sell worse than they ever have) but at all the media turning out to cover him.

Once upon a time, Jack Kirby said that comic books would someday be recognized as the greatest source of American popular art.  And even as aware as I was of Jack's incredible track record for describing the future, I don't think I was prepared to accept it until I saw it for myself.  The poster's tag line — "The Gold Knight Returns" — even testifies to the impact of comic books on popular culture.  So how come so few comics are selling…and the ones that are selling aren't selling more?  Beats me.

Anyway, you can order your own copy of Alex's splendid poster at www.oscars.org if you are so inclined.  I like the design but I think I'm even more amused that, in the world of Oscar as a super-hero, his "bat-signal" is promoting a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company.  There's a call of distress if ever there was one.

Brief but nice obit in The Los Angeles Times for veteran animator Ray Patterson, who I knew, though not well, when I worked at Hanna-Barbera.  Here's the link…and this thought: The last time I spoke to Ray was at Bill Hanna's memorial.  The last time I spoke to Avery Schreiber was at Lorenzo Music's memorial.  A good purpose for funerals is to remind us to stay in touch with people while we still can.

The following thought is probably not worth the amount of time I'm about to devote to it…but that never stops me.  The common Internet term for junk e-mail is spam.  It's a noun ("I keep getting spam in my mailbox") and a verb ("Someone's been spamming me") and I've even seen it used as an adjective ("He's been operating a spam campaign").

Just where, I've wondered for some time, did this slang come from?  Presumably, someone started using it on some computer bulletin board, even before the Internet made those quaint, dial-up entities obsolete, and it caught on and spread.

But why spam?  Of all the silly things in this world that could have been picked, why spam?  What is there about the concept of electronic junk mail, I wondered, that led someone to associate the name with a certain brand of canned luncheon meat and inspired others to seize upon it?  Someone I asked said it was because Spam (the stuff in cans) is awful and so is unwanted e-mail.  This, I cannot accept. I've never tried the product but it's been around for two-thirds of a century.  It can't be that terrible…and, even if it is, there are a lot of awful things around.  Why don't we refer to e-mail ads as "Cole Slaw?"  Or "Ingrown Toenails?"  Or "Rob Schneider's last movie?"

Why, I wondered, did spam come to denote someone sending you an unwanted e-mail ad for money-making schemes or penis enlargement?  (Almost all the spam I receive presumes I am short on either funds or something else.)  True, its silly name and lack of connection to "real" food may well make it the butt of jokes.  It's actually a cut of ham that's been spiked with preservatives and spices.  The name is short for Spiced Ham but I don't think most people know that.  Seemed to me, it's widely considered to be some kind of artificial, canned mystery meat…but, again, I didn't see the link to e-mail.

It only began to make sense when I thought of the Monty Python routine in which a greasy-spoon diner serves "Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam, baked beans and Spam."  Perhaps, one day, someone found their computer inbox filled primarily with unwanted e-mail solicitations.  Instead of muttering, "Ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, ad, message from Phil, ad," etc., they started imitating the Pythons, likening the pattern of junk mail to the constancy of Spam in that cafe.  Add to that the concept that the Hormel product is innocuous or perhaps that it's a meat that seems to come from no known animal — just like Internet ads seem to do — and the nickname kinda, sorta applies.  Maybe.

I have since stumbled upon The Official Spam Website…which I guess means that there is now nothing on the planet that does not have its own Official Website.  Anyway, the Hormel company has its own explanation which you can read at www.spam.com or you can go by my summary, which is as follows…

They claim that it's because, in the Python sketch, a chorus of Vikings start singing, "Spam, spam, spam," etc., and it drowns out the dialogue, the way spam messages stifle dialogue on discussion forums.  I'm not sure I buy this.  It sounds to me like the Spam™ People (wasn't that a Roger Corman movie?) are reaching for a spin that casts no negatives on the dignity of their product.  In any case, the point of the sketch is that Spam (the meat) is constant, that it turns up ad nauseam, that it's something you'd be stupid to welcome but, in this eatery, it's forced on you.  Surely, whoever first applied the name to electronic advertising regarded it as an insult.

Perhaps I'm overthinking this matter.  No, I take that back.  I know I'm overthinking this matter.  But if anyone reading this has any better explanation, I'd love to hear it.

• Ex-Newsman's Case Full of Holes by Tom Shales, Electronic Media
• Liar's Poker by William Saletan, Slate
• Who's Home, Who's Not by Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
• Let Down His Rich Pals?  Over His Dead Body by Robert Scheer, Los Angeles Times
• The Long Arm of the Single Actor by William F. Buckley, Jr.
• The Critics Are Wrong by John W. Dean
• Bush Donors Prepare Another Wish List by Jim Vandehei and Tom Hamburger, Wall Street Journal

The above links are to articles that the operator of this website believes contribute to the national debate.  He does not necessarily agree with all or any of what they say…and you won't, either.