Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by the Jazz Ambassadors, who seem to be a subset of the United States Army Field Band…

• In his memoirs, John Boehner says Bill Clinton was only impeached because Congressman Tom DeLay convinced enough of the GOP that it was a good move politically which would win them lots of seats. Nice of John to tell us that 23 years later.

Just days after I wrote about the joy of seeing my favorite movie — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — at the Cinerama Dome theater in Hollywood, we get the news that the Pacific Theater chain is permanently closing all its outlets in California. That amounts to 300 screens and includes the ArcLight complex near Sunset and Vine. And the ArcLight complex includes the Cinerama Dome.

The Cinerama Dome was literally built to show Mad World. It was the opening attraction there on 11/7/63 and I first saw my favorite movie there on 11/23/63 and many times since. I went to other movies at the ArcLight, as well. It was a great place to see movies. I can't quite explain why but I always had the feeling that the operators of the theaters there and the people who went to see movies there respected movies a little more than what I felt at other theaters around.

The news reports (like this one) suggest that someone or some company may step in and acquire the chain. I hope so. I'd sure like to see the theater complex at The Grove remain up and operating also.

Here's a highly-belated movie review. Friday night, I watched the 1980 movie Xanadu for the first time.  I had seen excerpts from it when it first came out.  I'd seen and really enjoyed the 2007 Broadway show based on it.  For some reason, I even had a DVD of the film…but I'd never watched it, start to finish.  A friend of mine was here and we decided we would.

I think I can explain why I'd never watched it before.  When it was in production, you could barely escape the advance publicity.  It hadn't even finished shooting and already — its publicists wanted us to believe — the world had embraced it as the greatest movie musical ever…a unique blending of Classic Tradition and Today.  "Today" in this case was the era of Roller Disco and other concurrent fads you could sense becoming passé as you heard about them for the first time.

When it finally came out, I felt like I was being ordered to go see it.  Sometimes, we don't do something just because we resent someone telling us to do it.

Plus, with that kind of pre-hype, you'd better be damned awesome and most folks I knew said that Xanadu wasn't.  But then again, it also wasn't harmful or evil or without hummable, fun moments.  It was just a silly movie about nothing of consequence treated as a story of great significance…and 1980 was the time of Apocalypse Now and Norma Rae and Breaking Away and Kramer Vs. Kramer and a lot of "issue" films that made the "non-issue" ones seem even more trivial.

I think I felt sorry for Xanadu. People were dumping on it like the filmmakers had committed mass genocide by not talking about an important issue…like mass genocide. I know I often cringe at the "pile-on" damnation of certain creative works. I felt that way about the recent movie of Cats.  This was Cats, people.  What were you expecting?

I had a friend — and I haven't seen or talked to her in four decades — who played one of the muses in the film of Xanadu. We were dining one evening in a steak place and couldn't help but hear a too-loud party at the next table. Abetted by alcohol, they were whooping it up about how horrible Xanadu was and the air was thick with schadenfreude.

Not liking a movie is one thing. I've not liked plenty in my days. But this was raw, childish glee that the people who made it were or deserved to be in pain. One guy was taking it personally that "shit like that" gets funded, whereas all the genius movies he obviously could create — every one of them, a surefire Best Picture honoree — do not get made.

I asked my date if she'd like me to call over a waiter to see if we could be reseated farther from the Xanadu-bashing table. She said no, it didn't bother her. But you could tell it did…a lot.  If the movie was lousy — and not having seen it, I didn't know if it was or wasn't — it wasn't because of what she'd done. She was proud of what she'd done.

She did tell me about a dancer she knew who auditioned for Xanadu and somehow not gotten hired. Given how many it had employed, that was embarrassing. When the reviews of the film came out, that dancer had not been able to resist calling with some faux sympathy: "Oh, I'm so sorry your movie is a flop!"

I'm not defending bad movies here; just suggesting that often, as per Gilbert & Sullivan, the punishment does not fit the crime. And I long ago got tired of people trying to prove what great, refined taste they have be declaring that almost everything is beneath them. Just let it go. It's just, at worst, a bad movie. You've seen them before, you'll see them again.

And that's kind of how I felt about the film of Xanadu: A couple of great songs. Olivia was adorable. Much of the dancing was great…and it was nice to have a relic of that period and to see Gene Kelly still being Gene Kelly at the age of 68. I didn't hate it but I wasn't furious it got made. I just can't get that incensed over something that inconsequential.

I tried this once before and it didn't take. Let's try it again…

The late Bill Finger, as many but not enough of us know, was the unbilled-for-far-too-long co-creator of Batman and much of the Batman mythos. Throughout his life, he received way too little credit for this (i.e., none) and nowhere near enough financial reward.

That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately, his face continues to be miscredited. Very few photos of Finger exist and one often sees photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger.

Most often, it's a photo of Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured a photo of him from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.

The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.

Because the photo of Kanigher often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display it when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing Kanigher identified as Finger.  I made up this graphic and I'm posting it here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting it because I want them to get into the databases of Google, Bing and other search engines.

If you have a website that has anything to do with comic books or Batman or which just gets a lot of hits from the "spiders" that crawl the web collecting images for search engines, please copy the image below and post it on your site. Do not change the name of it.

Put it up and if enough folks do this, it will be seen among the first images when someone searches for a photo of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics.  Thank you.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by the great guitarists Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis…

• John Kerry is currently serving as the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Science. He needs to take a few minutes out of that job and get his wife to do something about the Ketchup Shortage.

Our current view on The Pandemic here at newsfromme.com is Guardedly Optimistic. We're impressed with the speed and scope of the vaccinations but feel that there are too many folks and elected officials who think it's over…too much unmasking and public gathering.

I'm as vaccinated as a person can be right now and I still wear a mask and keep a good distance from others when out in the wild. When people ask me if I expect to go to this or that public event in the future, my answer is still "We'll see" and I don't put much stock in anyone's predictions of when things will be "normal" again. I don't even believe in anyone's notions of what will constitute normality. Clearly, a lot of things have changed forever.

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I'm not watching politics much but every time I peek, I see Donald Trump throwing his little Sore Loser "I won in a landslide!" fit. A lot of those who back him up seem to me to not really believe he won but they do believe that's a good position from which to operate. And as Matthew Rozsa notes in this article, a lot of Republican leaders are trying to have it both ways. They want to keep Trump voters angry about "The Steal" without insisting that there was one.

The Trump/Hitler analogies in that article go too far, as all Anyone/Hitler comparisons usually do. But I'm going to quote this one paragraph because I may want to refer people to it at a later date…

It isn't really necessary to go through every specious Trump claim with a fine-toothed comb. He already had the opportunity to do so multiple times, and he lost on every single occasion. His own attorney general, William Barr, investigated Trump's claims and found that Biden had won legitimately. Republican leaders in the key states whose results would need to be overturned for Trump to win admitted that he had lost. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump's assertions had no merit. He filed dozens of lawsuits and lost every single one that asserted fraud, as well as nearly all of the ones in which he did not claim fraud. (More than two-thirds of the 60 cases he brought to court did not claim fraud at all but appear to have been PR stunts; he won only one of those, a Pennsylvania case over technical procedural issues.) Many of those judges were Republicans, including some appointed by Trump himself.

And I'd add one more big point to that: Before the election, every single poll major poll — including the Fox News Poll and those from other agencies that skewed pro-Trump — showed him losing by a significant margin…and then he lost by a significant margin. Explain that conspiracy against him along with the dozens of others.

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These days, I'm probably more interested in what's going on with the San Diego Convention Center. The center's website now lists "Comic-Con Special Edition" for November 26-29 — four days instead of three. That's Friday through Monday but perhaps the idea is that Monday is a teardown/moving out day and not a day the convention would be open. The calendar there also shows so many other conventions booked that it's doubtful the Comic-Con people could switch to any other dates later this year.

And it says the "Special Edition" — details of which I understand are still very, very "iffy" ‐ would have an attendance of 130,000. I seriously doubt they'll be trying to make it that large.

In the meantime…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has transferred about 300 teenage girls who had arrived this month at the San Diego Convention Center to a facility in Texas to make room for younger children. The San Diego Convention Center, which is currently being used to house unaccompanied minors who arrived in the United States to seek asylum from their homelands, reached capacity last weekend at about 1,450 children — all girls ages 13 to 17 and some younger who were accompanied by their teenage siblings.

I am resisting the compulsion to go down there and host panels for them. And if I read the news correctly, the homeless folks who have been occupying another part of the convention center are now being relocated elsewhere and it will soon cease to be a place for them.

Also in the meantime, the San Diego City Council is grappling with the question of last year's Measure C, which was a ballot proposal to raise the local hotel tax to finance a major expansion of the convention center along with several homeless programs and an awful of much-needed street repairs. The initiative garnered 65.24% of the vote but it technically needed two-thirds…

…or did it? There are currently all sorts of court challenges and arguments saying that it only needed to surpass 50% or maybe that it came close enough…or something. The Mayor and City Council are (mostly) saying yes, it passed, let's go ahead with it. Further discussions and court decisions are pending.

The forecast for the 2022 WonderCon is that it will take place for real at the Anaheim Convention Center and the dates circulating are April 1-3, which is not Easter Weekend. I place no stock in predictions but if I did, that would seem like a pretty safe one. As with everything in this dispatch, we shall see.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Dominik Hauser…

Turner Classic Movies is running my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World Monday. The schedule says that, at least on my cable service, it starts at 5:15 PM and is followed at 8 PM by It's Always Fair Weather. That would suggest they're running the 2 hour and 42 minute version of Mad World — which is the version I'd show if I were them.

On the TCM site, they list the running time for the movie as 3 hours and 12 minutes. I know a lot of people don't believe in science anymore but I believe it's still impossible to show a 192 minute movie in a 165 minute time slot.

The running time of this movie is actually difficult to discuss because there are all these different elements: The overture, the Intermission, the recorded police calls during the Intermission, the Entr'Acte, the Exit Music and a couple of different versions of the movie, trimmed and untrimmed. When someone cites a running time, they're sometimes counting some of those elements and not others. I believe though the version that TCM always shows is 162 minutes from the first note of music to the last. I could easily be wrong.

I would ordinarily tell you not to watch it, especially if you've never seen it before or haven't seen it in a very long time. I love this movie but I love it on a huge screen in one of these things we used to go to called a "movie theater." Google that term if you don't remember what that is. And it should also be seen with a packed audience that's primed to laugh. It's greatly diminished when viewed alone or with one other person on a small home screen.

However, it may be some time before it's possible to see it that way. And if they show it that way in the next few months at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood — a theater that was literally built to show this movie — I'm not sure I'll even go.

It would be nice to. I first saw this film at the Cinerama Dome on 11/23/63 — the day after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, a day when the entire world was still in shock. One of the reasons I love it so much is that for for 201 minutes (the running time at that point), I was living in a world of very funny people…a world where insane things happened but at least no one shot the President.

Some but not all of my affection for this movie flows from that. The rest has a lot to do with the age I was when I first saw it, my affection then and now for the performers, my affection for how fascinating every moment of the film is to me, and affection of other factors too numerous to mention.

I'm not recommending watching it on TCM but because it may be a while before you can see it the right way. I'm also not recommending not watching it on TCM. Proceed at your own risk. And if you don't like it there, don't judge it by that.

Here's a pretty good account of how MAD magazine came to be. It doesn't make the mistake that most histories do of claiming that MAD changed from a comic book to a magazine in order to avoid the Comics Code. The timing would make you think it did but actually, MAD went to magazine format to appease Harvey Kurtzman, its first editor, who was embarrassed to be in the comic book industry then.

He wanted to work in slick magazines so Bill Gaines, who was the publisher of MAD, offered to turn it into a slick magazine so Kurtzman wouldn't leave…and Kurtzman didn't leave. Not until a few months later when he was offered a classier job by Hugh Hefner. Gaines felt betrayed but he kept MAD going under a new regime and before long, he was very, very wealthy…

Like a lot of you, I know a fair amount about computers and like all of you, I know someone I can call who knows a lot more about computers than I do. You need someone like that because no matter how much you know, something will eventually go wrong that requires way more savvy than you possess.

I was just on the phone with my person-who-knows-way-more-than-I-do and we were fixing something. He gave me this great quote which came from a gent named Maurice Wilkes who was — according to Wikipedia — "a British computer scientist who designed and helped build the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (EDSAC), one of the earliest stored program computers, and who invented microprogramming, a method for using stored-program logic to operate the control unit of a central processing unit's circuits."

He was talking about debugging (studying the code of a program that ain't working to figure out why it ain't working) and he wrote…

By June 1949, people had begun to realize that it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. It was on one of my journeys between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

I heard that quote and I thought it would resonate with a lot of folks who read this site but who don't write computer programs.

It's been four years ago today since my wonderful friend/love/companion Carolyn Kelly lost her battle with Cancer…and battle, she did. The last few years of it, she fought and she fought and she fought…and the outcome just became more and more inevitable.

At the oddest times, with no visible triggering mechanism, I find myself thinking about how horrible it was for her. There's always that maddening frustration of looking at a situation, knowing it shouldn't have been like that…but not being able to think of any other way things could have turned out for the better or been much less painful.

I miss her…and not just on this one day a year. I miss her often and in the better moments, I miss the Carolyn of happier times…the one who had so many reasons to live instead of that one ugly one to not. Often, something occurs and my thoughts take the form of "Oh, I wish she was here to share this experience with me." I think of her laughing, smiling and just being a wonderful presence. She was very good at those things and at so many others.

Most of me has moved on, as she wanted me to do. For years, I have told others who've lost loved ones that it's not disrespectful to the memory of the deceased to get on with your life, to meet new people, to stop grieving. Every so often, I have to tell myself…and not just on April 9th.

It's Charlie Frye again, doing more of that magic and juggling stuff he does…

Brian Dreger wrote me to ask…

I was born in 1960 and I read comic books during the 60s, 70s, 80s and into the 90s (and also read reprint collections of stuff before that). So, I'm just a fan. But…I can't figure out how you — who started out as just a fan — can look at a comic book and tell that the person who allegedly drew it is not that person but someone else trying to draw like that person!

Also, I am amazed that you can look at someone's artwork and tell who inked it! In various posts, you've talked about this, and you always seem very, very confident that you know that you're right. How? Did you take art classes and picked up a lot of insight from that? I realize this is a very long (and probably stupid) question, but if you could edit this down and figure out how to answer me, that would be great.

Yes, I took art classes but no, they had nothing to do with recognizing art styles…a skill which a lot of people have. It just comes from reading a lot of comics and paying attention to credits. To be honest with you, I was always more interested in how comic books were made and in the people who made them than I was in the characters in those comic books. I am not one of those guys who can name all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes and which planet they came from…but I could tell you everyone who inked Jack Kirby's work or which Batman stories allegedly drawn by Bob Kane were drawn by Sheldon Moldoff, which ones were drawn by Jim Mooney, which ones were inked by Charles Paris, etc.

An awful lot of folks can do this and occasionally we get into little debates about certain work where it isn't so obvious. It can sometimes be tricky, especially on pre-1980 work where it was more common to have someone in the office retouch work done by outside artists. Stan Lee very routinely would look at a cover that was about to go to press and almost on a whim — just because he wanted to do something to maybe make it better — he'd have John Romita or Marie Severin or someone on staff redraw portions of it.

Of course, not everyone can do this. It kinda stunned me when I got into the business that there were editors who couldn't recognize styles…or at least, some styles. But then a lot of people in comics never spent much time looking at comics they weren't working on.