As you are utterly aware, we took a historic photo at Comic-Con last Saturday with thirty-five cartoon voice actors. Well, thirty-four and me plus a couple we can't see well enough…but it was still historic. The occasion was to welcome Japanese Voice Icon Mari Shimizu, to Comic-Con and America.

A lot of folks are asking who's who in the pic so let's try to identify them all. I think (emphasis on my uncertainty) I can get about two-thirds of them but I could be wrong about a few.

Some of you are sending me educated guesses so we'll make this a contest with absolutely no prize. If you click on this link, your screen (hopefully on a big monitor, not your phone) will fill with a big version of the photo with everyone numbered. I'm #1, Mari is #26 and you can send in your guesses for the rest of us to this e-mail address. I'll play detective and compare the lists and arrive at what I think are the correct identifications — which I'll post here along with names of whoever got the most right.

That person will win absolutely nothing. In the event of a tie, all the winners will receive absolutely nothing. So go to it, voice actor fans!

Glenn Kessler, the Fact-Checker for the Washington Post, is throwing in the towel and retiring, at least from that position. In his last column, he assesses the state of fact-checking in American journalism and comes to the conclusion that an awful lot of people really don't care if what a politician says is true or not. Guess who brought Kessler to that conclusion.

There are many, many stories to tell about last week's gathering in San Diego but I thought I'd get started with a few photos…

The first of the nineteen panels I hosted or appeared on at Comic-Con was an easy one: Just me and my longtime pal Leonard Maltin sitting there, telling stories from our lives.  He told about meeting Buster Keaton.  I told about meeting Leonard Maltin.  We both told about meeting Groucho Marx and other famous/funny folks.  If we'd been splitting a pizza as we talked, it would have been just like any of the first three dozen times Leonard and I got together.

I'm not going in any sequence here. Saturday evening, there was a lovely memorial for our friend Peter David which — fittingly because this was Peter — was full of very funny stories.  The folks in the back row here, left to right, are Paul Levitz, Maggie Thompson, Tom Brevoort and Chris Ryall.  The front row is George Takei and me.  I had a much better time at this event than my face would indicate.

At Comic-Con, I host a Cartoon Voices Panel on Saturday and another one on Sunday. This is the Sunday panel from the con just past and the back row here consists of David Errigo Jr., Gabe Kunda, Michael Scott Action, Kaitlyn Robrock and Vincent Martella.  The front row is Abby Trott, Maurice LaMarche and me.  Again, I was happier than my face would suggest.  So was Maurice.  This was one of the funniest panels I've ever moderated.

There's a long story behind this one. It's from the Saturday Cartoon Voices panel and on it, I had Dana Gould, Audrey Wasilewski, Fred Tatasciore, Jim Meskimen, Benni Latham and Gregg Berger. Just those six. But after a wonderful discussion and script reading, I began to make like the announcer on The Price is Right and call other voice actors to "Come on' Down!" We had a Special Important Surprise Guest and I thought we should have a bigger welcoming committee to honor her appearance.

So I brought thirty or more actors down to the front of the stage, then I introduced that Special Important Surprise Guest. It was Mari Shimizu, one of Japan's leading voice actresses and the original voice of Astro Boy. The place went wild. I interviewed her a bit — we were tight on time — and then the place went wild again when I brought out Candi Milo, a recent voice for Astro Boy in America. Mari and Candi hugged and cried and a lot of folks in Room 6BCF cried, too. A very happy occasion! We then all went out in the hall and took the above group photo.

What's that? You say it's too small? Well, click on it and it'll get much, much bigger. Then, you'll be able to pick out Mari, three in from the right in the second row from the front.  Candi, holding an Astro Boy toy is on the right end of that row.  I'm the guy on the left with the hat and cane, and also in there I see…well, would someone like to take a stab at identifying everyone else in this photo?  We'll have more to say about this panel in the near future.  It was pretty unforgettable.

You can also copy this photo to your computer and/or post it anywhere you like or link to it here…but if you do, please explain what it is, who our Special Surprise Guest was and also credit my buddy Bruce Guthrie.  I'll have more Comic-Con photos here in a day or so but none will be as special as this one.

I am incapable of discussing White House turmoil for more than a few lines without referencing the Watergate Scandal. One of the things Nixon did wrong in handling it — and of course, there were many — was to not answer every accusation in real time. The strategy was to let his opponents amass their evidence and formulate their version of what happened…then Nixon would come forth with his version, which would knock down every point in their case. This did not work.

Regarding L'affaire Epstein, Trump is taking the opposite approach, trying to knock down every bit of evidence and every charge the minute it surfaces. The result is that he has no coherent explanation for anything; just a lot of factoids and falsehoods whipped up on the spot to answer each day's new revelations…and in so doing, he's creating the next day revelations. His answer the other day about why he and Epstein supposedly parted ways — Epstein purloined employees including sex-trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago — creates more questions. And his answers to those questions will create more and more and more…

I found (and did a little tweaking on) the above graphic online. I have no idea who made it but I thought it was a pretty good explanation of the practice of gerrymandering districts so the gerrymanderers' party gets more representation than they probably should.

Gerrymandering is, of course, an ancient tradition in any city, township, state (whatever) that elects anyone with a party affiliation. It's not new. What is new though is for the gerrymandering folks are doing to not try to pretend they're doing something other than what they unreservedly are. There are now those within the Texas G.O.P. who are practically bragging about doing it.

Gavin Newsom says if they do it there, he'll do it in California and gain even more seats for Democrats. It's fighting fire with fire…and I wish we could elect leaders in this country without fire. That wasn't the idea behind America.

Over at IGN, Roy Schwartz wrote a pretty good article about the resemblances between the character "The Thing" in Fantastic Four and the guy who designed and drew him, Jack Kirby. Almost all the heroes Jack created or co-created, including even some villains, have a certain amount of Kirby in them. Some, like Ben Grimm (aka The Thing), Nick Fury and just about any protagonist in Jack's Fourth World, are more obvious than others but there was a lot of autobiography in there. And like I'm quoted in the article saying, I often re-read a Kirby comic I've read a zillion times and suddenly spot a dose of self-reference in it I'd never spotted before.

The article contains a reproduction of a Hanukkah card that historians cite to prove that in Jack's mind, The Thing was and is Jewish.  I suspect Jack must have said that in some interview once, as well.  But some people don't know the history of the card.  They think it's something the Kirbys designed and printed up to send to all their friends. Or something Jack issued to declare the character's faith to the world.

Nope. There was only card like this and it was sent to a good friend of the Kirby family, David Folkman. What happened was that David sent a Hanukkah card to the Kirbys and they — Jack and Roz — decided to reciprocate. Roz bought a printed Hanukkah card in a store and Jack added the drawing. I don't think Jack intended it as a public declaration of Ben Grimm's religion. It was just something they sent to Dave Folkman who later shared it with the world.

Here's another great juggler — Kaito Tanioka…

If you were in San Diego this last weekend, you saw many a big building covered in a wrap that advertised something — usually a movie. And hey, do you want to know something interesting about those giant wraps? They're illegal!

Did you ever see Alexander Koblikov juggle? You should…

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard claims that there was a "treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government" to make it seem like Russian forces interfered in the 2016 presidential election on behalf of Donald Trump. And of course, Trump constantly insists that the "Russia, Russia, Russian Hoax" has been thoroughly disproven. As Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post notes, it ain't been disproven…quite the opposite.

It now seems that one of the major distractions Trump is counting on to shift attention away from his own scandals is some sort of trial of Obama, Biden and others for treason in this matter. And given his recent remarks about Beyoncé, Oprah and Kamala Harris, he seems to think that campaigning against Donald Trump is an act of treason.

FactCheck.org and the Assocated Press say much the same thing as Glenn Kessler.

And Factcheck.org has yet another story about how Department of Health and Human Services and Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. doesn't understand his own job.

Meanwhile, the folks at Snopes do a deep dive into Trump's brags about walking into the dressing rooms at beauty pageants when the contestants were undressed. Some of what he said has been misrepresented but there's enough there to cause the kind of Conservative we used to have in this country to declare the confessor unfit for any public office and to demand jail time.

Daniel Dale over at CNN notes that Trump continues with the outright lies about what inflation in this country was and what it is now. And Politifact notes that Trump is still claiming that during the last presidential election, Democrats paid Beyoncé eleven million dollars — which, of course, is chump change to Beyoncé — to endorse Kamala Harris. There is, of course, no proof of this whatsoever.

Sorry this is so long but I've been away. And Trump lies a lot.

I'm home. I'll be spending the next few years sleeping and unpacking, sleeping and unpacking, sleeping and unpacking, etc. Eventually, things will return to normal on this blog and I'll finish the story I started. In the meantime, you might want to download your very own PDF copy of the convention souvenir book — or at least, read it online. You can do both those things at this link.

Here's a little less than nine minutes of one of my favorite comedians, George Carl. No, not George Carlin. George Carl. George Carlin was also one of my favorite comedians but he had to say funny things to get laughs. George Carl, who performed all around the world for decades, didn't have to utter a word to be funny. He just was funny. I saw Mr. Carl do about twenty minutes in Las Vegas many years ago at the now-extinct Stardust Hotel and I don't recall laughing harder in my life. I also saw Mr. Carlin in Vegas at what was then called Bally's and he was pretty great too but he had to talk. Here's George Carl. Ignore the silly short cartoons that bracket his performance…

…and in the middle of the night, no less. I enjoyed every nanosecond of this year's Comic-Con International and those of you who thought it was knuckleheaded beyond belief to agree to moderate or be on nineteen panels…well, next year I may go for twenty. I enjoyed every one of 'em and over the next few days, I'll tell you the what and why of the experience. It had a lot to do with liking how much the audiences liked what we did, especially the Quick Draw! game and the two Cartoon Voices panels. More on this to follow…

I'm not going to wait until I get home. Like many of my friends, I can quote or sing many of the weird and wonderful songs of Tom Lehrer, who died just the other day at the not-unimpressive age of 97. And like a lot of us, I wish he'd spent less of his life teaching math and more of it writing and recording joyous and subversive songs like "The Masochism Tango" and "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park."

I won't pretend to understand his career choices, nor is it any of my business why this gifted man didn't write more. A friend of mine who attended U.C. Santa Cruz (I think it was) took one of Professor Lehrer's math classes, at least in part because he was a fan of the man's records and was disappointed when almost the first thing Lehrer said on the first day was that at no point during the term would he be performing or even discussing his music.

That music will, of course, outlive its composer. In a sense, it almost did while he was still alive. But it will be especially available because a few years ago, Mr. Lehrer released it all into the public domain. If you want to do anything with it, go to this website and help yourself. You can even just listen to it for pure enjoyment…which it always delivered.