Hey, let's listen to Al Jaffee explain how the MAD Fold-In came to be…

That stand-off on the 91 Freeway ended shortly before 9:40 PM, which means an awful lot of folks sat in their cars, stuck there for two hours. The unidentified suspect was taken into custody. He was not, as seemed likely for a while, dead. He sat there for a long time, prolonging the inevitable.

S.W.A.T. units arrived around 9 PM and someone began trying to negotiate with the driver. I'm not sure what he had to offer except giving up without further delay or trouble, or what the cops had to offer except not shooting him. Anyway, somehow they couldn't come to an arrangement so after about the half hour on the scene, the S.W.A.T. guys busted the back window of the car, lobbed in a tear gas canister and the suspect was forced out and chomped on by a K-9 Corps pooch. I still think the hero of the evening was Stu Mundel.

As I was typing the above, I got a notice on my iPhone that Stu was broadcasting again on Periscope. He was showing us that after a long evening, he and the chopper were finally heading home. A job well done.

I'm watching a fascinating overlap of social and traditional media here — the live coverage of a car chase out on the 91 Freeway. A murder suspect in a black Mercedes led police on an hour-long chase and it's been reported — on my iPhone, then on my desktop computer and now on an early edition of KCAL-TV Channel 9 News — by my favorite newsguy, Stu Mundel. He's in a helicopter and he and his pilot were the first on the scene.

At first, Stu was covering it on Periscope and Twitter. That's where I first got notice of the pursuit. Then I switched over and watched it on the KCAL-TV 9 website, which is where it was streaming. The chase started in the city of Compton where police tried to pull the driver over. He ran and soon was on the freeway, sometimes driving about 20 MPH but occasionally speeding up. At points when he ran into slow-moving traffic, he began swerving and squeezing through cars, scraping and bumping several autos.

At one point during the slower portions of the chase, Stu announced on the web that he and his pilot had to stop covering the pursuit, go to Fullerton Airport to refuel, then they flew back and resumed coverage. Around 7:20, he excitedly announced that the coverage would start on broadcast television at 7:30. Channel 9 had to wait until a rerun of Two Broke Girls concluded.

When it did, Mundel was no longer a one-man show as he was joined by the in-studio KHJ anchors. They went with it just in time to watch the Mercedes hit a couple of spike strips on a long stretch of freeway with no other cars. The tires went out, the car began swerving and hitting the rails until it finally came to a halt. As I'm typing this, there's a standstill out there: No sign of activity in the Mercedes, a bank of police cars watching it a few yards back. The suspect was reported as "possibly armed" so they don't want to approach and Stu says they're waiting for a S.W.A.T. team to arrive, though everyone suspects the driver inside took his own life fifteen or twenty minutes ago.

None of that interests me so much as the fact that "social media" had the story first…and there were Stu Mundel and his pilot broadcasting to cellphones and computer screens for an hour or so. There are probably motorists stranded in the massive traffic backup on the 91 who have been watching this on their phones and some of them have also contributed. Channel 9 is showing photos which were taken by some of those drivers. They sent them in or posted them to social media and now they're part of the TV reporting.

This is a new kind of news coverage. I was not only watching it as it happened, I was watching before the TV channel started covering it. Stu — the man I refer to as the Vin Scully of Police Chases — was doing a great show, talking to Periscope followers, answering questions from Twitter, discussing not only what was happening below him but also explaining the problems and challenges of covering it all from the air. In a time when news couldn't be more distrusted and (often) somewhat phony, here's raw, unedited reporting getting to us immediately in real time. Amazing.

Here's the new Japanese production of a play that's all about teaching someone to speak English better…

In the current presidential election, this is the only thing that really matters — the breakdown of the Electoral College and who's gonna hit 270. That's a link to the Cook Political Report, which is a non-partisan entity. That of course means it's non-partisan to most folks when it tells them what they want to hear and it's deeply, undeniably biased when it doesn't.

I'm just dumb enough to believe that it's honest even when it doesn't tell me what I want to hear. Of course, one must remember that it's 186 days until the election, we don't yet know who the running mates may be, what anyone will say in their next five hundred speeches or at the conventions, what new issues or scandals will erupt, etc. Right now, it looks very good for Democrats, not so good for the Republicans. If this was a normal election, I would say it's all over but we don't have normal elections in this country anymore.

A new interview with Woody Allen.

• Opposing political correctness is getting to be too politically correct for me.

I said here last January I wouldn't believe Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee until Nate Silver said it was possible. Well, Silver has been saying for some time it was possible and here he explains why his earlier predictions that it wouldn't happen were wrong.

Of the three guys recently in the race, I think Trump will be the easiest to defeat and I kinda feel that if he did get into the White House, he would be less of a disaster than Cruz or Rubio. That's more of a hunch than a reasoned opinion. I also still think that any Democrat would have a tremendous advantage in this election for reasons that Chris Cillizza explains.

From now until November, folks will be cheering and fretting at all sorts of indicators that Trump is more or less likely to win. I've decided to only pay real attention to the electoral vote counts. Show me how Donald has a credible path to 270 and I'll believe it's possible. Which of the 24 states that have voted Democratic in four, five or all six of the last six elections will go red this time? I'm not saying it can't be done…just that saying things such as "Trump's getting better turnouts at his rallies than Hillary" or that "Hillary's popularity nationally is down three points" are meaningless unless accompanied by something like "Polls show neck-and-neck races in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania."

I guess I'm disappointed in how things have gone because a brokered Republican Convention looked like it would be a lot of fun to watch in a kind of Thunderdome way. On the other hand, it's going to be fun watching so many Republicans who are appalled by Trump and Democrats who didn't want Hillary try to convince everyone including themselves that they got the nominees of their dreams.

And then there's a certain unpredictability to this whole election that is kind of exciting. Startling, unprecedented plot twists do not occur one at a time. Something else that once was unthinkable is going to become highly thinkable. And if you think you know what it might be, that probably proves you're wrong.

Never mind the election. Let's get down to the important topics…like how do they make Cheez Doodles? And this video will also tell you how they make those packaged "Onion Ring" snacks, though they'll only tell you that they combine "dry ingredients and water." They won't tell you what those dry ingredients are. Suspicious? I am.

In this message, I asked folks to send in questions for me to answer on this here blog. Here's one from Ira W., who read the question I answered here yesterday…

Thank you for telling us how the staff at DC wanted to get Jack Kirby to draw more like other artists and less like Jack Kirby. I find it amazing but I guess I shouldn't. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot on creative enterprises. My question is why you think this happens. Why do people want to change others' work?

Well, let's be honest: There are times when someone's work isn't very good and it does need to be changed. I've rewritten other writers and other writers have rewritten me and there have even been times when we've rewritten together in the same room. One should not get into a collaborative art form if one is adverse to collaborating.

But what you're talking about mainly are changes that seem arbitrary or gratuitous. In comics, I once heard someone praise an editor by saying, "He isn't the kind of guy who has to change things just to prove he's making a contribution." That is a very good trait because there are guys in charge and gals in charge who do that; who demand or make alterations in the works of others because they're afraid they won't get enough credit if they don't put some fingerprints on it and then it's successful. (By the way and to forestall questions about who the editor was that was said about, it was Archie Goodwin.)

It's kind of a win/win situation for those who'd tamper with your work: If the project is successful and acclaimed, they can take some bows for it and try to steer folks into thinking it was the editorial guidance and alterations that made it fly. If the project flops…oh, of course that's the fault of the guy they rewrote, only they maybe don't mention that they did that. Or it's "I tried but even I couldn't save the disaster he handed in."

But it isn't always Office Politics at work. Sometimes, it's a matter of nerves. A lot of folks can't grasp the concept that if you keep fussing with something and making changes, you are not necessarily making it better. I once had some dealings with a movie studio exec — a guy with the power to green-light projects and to decide which screenplays would get made. Each of those decisions was him deciding his company would spend X million bucks and the "X" was usually not a single digit.

Obviously, if you guess wrong on enough of those decisions, you get fired and your career and huge salary go away so he was scared to be wrong. One way he dealt with that fear was to have scripts rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He probably had a lot of perfectly-fine scripts rewritten and perhaps ruined as he postponed the moment when he might have to say, "Yes, let's spend 50 million making this one." He was eventually sacked, not so much because he was green-lighting the wrong projects but because he wasn't green-lighting enough projects, period.

This is just something you have to deal with as a writer. Some of the producers and editors you work with are great and wise and sane and when they change things or ask you to change things, they're quite often right. And with some, the impetus to tamper comes from the wrong place.

Many years ago, I worked on a TV series which had a lot of producers listed in its credits — executive producers, supervising producers, senior producers, etc. I think there were eight of them but I only ever saw two of them make actual, real contributions. One of the other six did absolutely nothing. He was secure enough in his position (I guess) that he didn't feel the need to do what the rest of them did. Each of them would pop in once a week for five minutes and Save the Show.

That was the term we in the trenches had for what they did: Saving the Show. It meant that they would stop by and make a contribution just for the sake of being able to say they made a contribution. Some of these contributions were meaningless…like saying "We need to have the dark blue curtain off to stage right instead of the turquoise one" or "Make sure the camera gets a good two-shot of those actors in the scene they have together." Sometimes though, they were big changes that made a lot of work for others and/or harmed the program.

Either way, the changes ordered had this in common: They were done in the spirit of "Thank God I caught this in time or it would have been a disaster."

One time, I came back from a long lunch and asked one of the other writers what, if anything, had transpired in my absence. He said, "Well, Harry came by and he Saved the Show. Then Lyle came by and he Saved the Show. Then Phyllis came by and she really Saved the Show. Then Joey came by he really and truly Saved the Show. Oh — and there was some guy from the network who popped in and she Saved the Show…twice."

Nothing any of them demanded fixed anything or made anything better. The alterations didn't matter except that they allowed the Show-Savers to say they'd Saved the Show. The two producers who were hands-on and fully involved did make changes and decisions that made things better but others gave notes because they could. Once in a while, we could just ignore their Show-Saving advice and they never seemed to notice. I'm not sure any of them were even interested in watching the show. They just wanted to Save It.

Here's our pal "Wacky" Wally Wingert with another dive into the toy box he calls his home…

I confused something the other day when I mentioned that Frank Welker had received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Daytime Emmys…but you couldn't see that moment because the Daytime Emmys for this year are untelevised. Let me try and straighten things out…

The Daytime Emmy Awards are so vast in numbers that they present them in two shows. Some were handed out on Friday at the Daytime Creative Arts Emmy® Awards ceremony and some on Saturday at the Daytime Emmy® Awards ceremony. The Friday one is where Frank's statuette was presented and I don't think this one is ever televised. Also presented at this event were all the other animation-related Emmys.

For the last decade or two, the main ceremony has been televised but not this time. You can however view it on this page. If you do watch, you'll see a lot of folks who work on soap operas getting excited and there's a nice Lifetime Achievement Award presentation to Sonia Manzano of Sesame Street. There's also an "In Memoriam" reel which does not include our friend Joe Alaskey, who won the 2004 Daytime Emmy for Best Performance by an Actor on an Animated Series. The Emmy Awards have never shown much love for people whose faces are not well known.

Jim Rutenberg on the growing pains of Stephen Colbert's Late Night. I still think Colbert is the most talented guy to get one of those slots in years, maybe since Letterman. I was wrong to think that once he'd settled in, the show would get less scripted and would rely more on his well-proven ability to improvise on the fly. If anything, it was getting less spontaneous before the new showrunner arrived and since he's taken over, it sure hasn't gotten more so. If anything, it feels more carefully packaged than ever.

I don't think Colbert's in trouble…and if you read that he is, ignore it. Ignore it at least until you hear a credible name mentioned as a possible replacement. It's unlikely to come to that but if it does, I hope someone at CBS, before they give up on a brilliant guy like that, will at least try letting the show be the kind of show where unplanned things could happen.

The other day, I linked to a piece by Kevin Drum in which he all but accused Bernie Sanders of running a big con job, convincing his many supporters that the "revolution" of which he speak was ever easily attainable. Drum fears that those supporters are in for a cataclysmic letdown that will drive them and their idealism away from politics.

Greg Sargent sees it otherwise…possibly. And he asks the question of whether it was Sanders who convinced them they wanted that revolution or if they already felt that way and he was just the guy who could articulate it and maybe organize that sentiment. Sargent also sees it as possible that Sanders will throw his support to Hillary as someone who can make some of it come true. I sure hope so. I sure don't buy the argument that it's necessary to elect a President Trump so things will get so terrible that everyone will be begging for a Bernie by 2020.

I guess it worries me that so many vocal (i.e., posting on the Internet) Sanders loyalists seem unable to accept the possibility that Clinton might have won the nomination — this is assuming she does — fair and square. One keeps writing me that it was obvious Bernie deserves it more. Well, no. If he'd gotten more votes than Hillary, he would. Sometimes, the person we think is the better candidate doesn't.

I like where Bernie Sanders wants to take this country even if I'm not sure he knows how to get us there and that he's underestimated the length of the trip. I also don't think he's as electable as those polls that show him clobbering Trump or Cruz say. But I sure admire the guy and I'll admire him more if he can redirect most of the enthusiasm he's generated into not just helping elect Hillary Clinton but also a Democratic Senate and maybe — dare I say it? — a Democratic House of Representatives.

The Daytime Emmy Awards were handed out in a ceremony last night. One of the more popular ones (I hear) was the Lifetime Achievement Emmy given to our friend Frank Welker. Frank has done voices and vocal sound effects in more cartoons than any human being who has ever lived and has added his voice to a stunning list of motion pictures. It would not surprise me if he had more credits than every single other person who was up for an Emmy last night…and I don't mean more than any one of them. I mean more than all of them put together, including nominees, winners and maybe even presenters.

Don't believe me? Well, take a look at this guy's list of credits on the IMDB and then consider two things. One is that a single line in that listing might represent more than 100 episodes of a series. The other is that I think the list is woefully incomplete. It omits a number of things that he worked on just with me. That might be a tenth of all this man has done and it doesn't include commercials or radio shows or industrial films or lots of other areas in which he works.

I hear he gave a warm, humble acceptance speech during which he demonstrated many of his cartoon voices, plus did frighteningly-accurate impressions of Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Want to hear this speech? Well, I don't think you can. The Daytime Emmys were once broadcast live on network TV. Then they moved to basic cable. Then they switched to being represented on basic cable by an abridged version telecast weeks after the ceremony…and this year, they aren't on TV at all. Unless the Academy sticks some video up on their website or YouTube, we're all outta luck. There are some links up at YouTube that purport to show you the event but they all seem to divert you to websites of dubious integrity where God knows what you'd wind up downloading.

One legit cable channel did live-stream the red carpet arrivals and backstage goings-on. Here's Frank being interviewed on his way in. I'm directing some cartoons week after next with him in the cast and I will compliment him on his award, his humility and his graciousness when interviewed by someone who doesn't seem to have much idea who he is…