I was (and still am) a big fan of Allan Sherman, the great singer of song parodies. As I mentioned back here, he played the Hollywood Bowl twice — in 1963 and again in 1964 — and both times, my parents took me to see him.

Eric Yarber, a devout follower of this blog, e-mailed to tell me that someone has uploaded to the net this audio recording of Allan Sherman at the Bowl. It's 47 minutes of what he did there in '63 and I was in that audience. I am amazed to be able to hear it again, more than half a century later.

I've been saying I think Stephen Colbert will do great in the 11:30 time slot. Well, he already did great in that time slot but I think he'll do great as himself in that time slot on CBS. Sean Cannon explains why he thinks so. I think he overstates it a bit but I generally agree with him.

Here's a sketch from Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. The date is unknown and it would be interesting to know if this is from when Neil Simon was on the writing staff. The skit is about a poker game and there's at least one joke in there that was roughly duplicated in Mr. Simon's play, The Odd Couple…

I started watching the Tony Awards a half-hour ago, figuring to stay off social media until it's over so I don't find out who won what before I actually see the envelope opened on my screen. Unfortunately, (a) I'm on the West Coast where it's tape-delayed and (b) often, social media comes after me.

Little notifications from news sources began popping up on the screen of my iPhone telling me what won for Best Musical, Best Play, Best Revival, etc. I turned it off but I'm a very fast reader so I couldn't not get that information.

Then I turned my attention back to my desktop computer screen and a little window popped up showing me I had four new e-mails. It showed me who'd written, when they'd written and their subject lines…and three of the four subject lines told me who'd won for Best Actor, Best Actress, etc.

So much for suspense. I'm not sure if next year I'll just forget about not finding out in advance or if I'll turn everything off in my house except the TV. Because that's what it'll take.

Gonna watch the Tony Awards tonight. Since I haven't been to New York in many years, I watch these less to root for anything than to just see what's playing back there and what I'll go see if and when I get back. The years Neil Patrick Harris hosted, I also watched for his exquisite showmanship. He's not hosting this evening but is supposed to be making an appearance on the telecast.

Usually, there's not a whole lotta suspense about who's going to win but as this article notes, tonight there's some genuine suspense in some of the major categories. I guess I'm kinda rooting for Kelli O'Hara to win Best Actress in a Musical for revival of The King and I. I didn't see it but I've seen her in a lot of things and she's always been deserving. If when I do go back, it's still running and she's still in it, she could even make me go see The King and I, a show I never particularly liked.

But then I'd also like to see Kristen Chenoweth in On the Twentieth Century, a show I do like. I really need to get back to New York. Just as soon as the Carnegie Deli reopens because while it's closed, what's the point?

Neil Gaiman has some ideas about ideas. I have some ideas about Neil Gaiman's ideas. My main idea is to steal his.

• Scott Walker says he might re-invade Iraq. That's great because the first time worked so well but didn't cost quite enough lives or money.

In 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I spent a few days up at the offices of Marvel Comics, which were then on Madison Avenue in New York City. A few minutes ago, I was browsing Ye Olde Internet and I came upon these photos that were taken in that office in 1970 and I thought, "Gee, the office looks just like it did when Steve and I were there. Even some of the same things are pinned up on the walls. Those must have been taken only a few months before or after we were there."

Then I noticed the photos were taken by Steve Sherman. No wonder everything looked just like it did when we were there.

Quick funny story. As you may be able to tell, most of those who worked in the office then were in little cubicles, surrounded by walls which did not reach all the way to the top. These photos were taken on a Tuesday or Thursday. Stan Lee was the guy in charge but Stan only came in on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays so "The Boss" was not there that day.

Some in the office were annoyed at a rule that Stan had just laid down. The offices were a fun place with a lot of joking about and inter-office pranks. Many of the artists working there were known to dash off and pin-up insulting cartoons about each other and sometimes, these cartoons could get a bit raunchy. John Romita, whose duties then included drawing covers for some romance comics, had drawn alternate versions of a couple of those covers in which the posing and dialogue was exactly the same but the women were nude. Some of the dialogue took on different meanings when that change was made.

Stan had ordered all this stuff off the walls since once in a while, children were brought in to tour the office. The folks who worked there seemed to feel that was an unfair decree on his part. Only a few drawings were naughty and those were easily hidden when kids came by. The staff felt that what Stan was really trying to get rid of were the cartoons kidding each other. Since he was the head guy, an awful lot of them were about him.

Anyway, since Stan was out that day, a new round of cartoons about him went up, depicting him as a bad sport. Marie Severin, who was appallingly good at caricatures, drew one of Stan ordering all the cartoons off the walls, especially the ones that made fun of his toupee, which was then about as big a secret in comics as the fact that Clark Kent was Superman. In the drawing Marie did, Stan was yelling, "No one knows about my hairpiece!" and the hairpiece had a huge price tag hanging off it and everyone else on the staff was laughing and yelling at him, "You've got it on backwards!"

Also, some naughty drawings were pinned up. The plan was that at the end of the day, all of this would be taken down to comply with Stan's order. None of it would be there when he came in to work the next day.

Suddenly though, they heard Stan's voice! It was coming over the top of the room dividers near the front. He'd just come in!

Everyone panicked, rushing to rip down drawings that were naughty or about Stan. They got them all down just as he came around the corner —

— and it wasn't Stan. It was his brother Larry. Larry Lieber, who wrote and drew for Marvel, sounded just like Stan when he spoke loud enough. There was a burst of relieved laughter and John Verpoorten, who was the production manager, suggested this was a sign from God; that they'd gotten a reprieve and shouldn't risk putting the drawings back up.

Marie Severin took about a dozen of her Stan-mocking cartoons and slipped them into a manila envelope to take home. Then she turned to me and said, "You just witnessed the end of an era. Cartoons on the walls were where most of us did our best work." Of course, the tradition resumed a few weeks or months later.

I'm really glad Steve took all those photos of the office but I wish he'd taken the inside ones about a half hour earlier…when the cartoons were still up.

Merrill Markoe explains "College Is Not the Best Four Years of Your Life." Her days in college could not have been less like my days in college, which were a little after hers and only lasted two years before I quit.

Amazing moments on the baseball field…

And since I'm in an Equal Time mood today, here's Piers Morgan giving his side of the incident that led to the tweet from John Cleese I quoted earlier. If there's ever a contest to see which of these two men — Cleese or Morgan — less deserves the label of "whining pub bore," I'm betting all I own on the Dead Parrot Guy.

In fairness to Justice Scalia — and despite the fact that I don't think he's usually fair to others — I should clarify/correct something. There's no record of him actually saying that it was inarguable that Henry Lee "Buddy" McCollum was guilty. He presumed McCollum was guilty when he brought him up but so did Justice Blackmun, who was arguing against the Death Penalty for McCollum in that case.

Blackmun actually had two arguments and neither one was that McCollum hadn't done what they said he'd done. One was, and I quote —

Buddy McCollum is mentally retarded. He has an IQ between 60 and 69 and the mental age of a 9-year old. He reads on a second grade level. This factor alone persuades me that the death penalty in his case is unconstitutional.

The other argument was that McCollum's three convicted cohorts in the rape/murder were not sentenced to death; just the guy with the mental age of a 9-year old. Scalia cited the brutal crime to say that death-by-lethal injection seemed "enviable" compared to the crime that had been committed. (Apparently in Scalia's world, the way in which we execute murderers doesn't have to be humane. It just has to not be as bad as what they did to their victims.)

Elsewhere though, Scalia has been a firm believer that innocent people are never put to death by our government. In 2006, he wrote, "If such an event [an innocent person's execution] had occurred in recent years, we would not have to hunt for it; the innocent's name would be shouted from the rooftops by the abolition lobby."

The flaw in that argument, I've always thought, is two-fold. One is that once someone is put to death, it is rare that their innocence is ever investigated. The state that executed them sure doesn't want to see that proven and often puts great obstacles in the way of those who try to exonerate the executed. And once the person's dead, there's a lot less reason for anyone to push for exoneration.

The second flaw is that it has been shouted — maybe not from rooftops but in the press. Here are ten instances, most of which were established before Scalia's "rooftops" statement in 2006.

The more than 150 people who were sentenced to Death Row but exonerated before execution is also a pretty strong argument that we do execute the innocent. If McCollum had been executed back when Scalia said his lethal injection would be "enviable," his innocence would probably have never been established. But no, Scalia did not say McCollum's guilt was inarguable. He said the guilt of everyone who'd been executed was inarguable.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once defended the Death Penalty by pointing to a certain convicted killer whose guilt was inarguable and whose crime was about as horrible as any ever committed in this country. That man, who he said clearly deserved to die, was Henry Lee McCollum

Henry Lee McCollum has been pardoned after spending three decades in prison. Turns out he was innocent.

Jeff Keller wrote to ask…

What's the deal with these Mentalist reruns in Letterman's old time slot? Late night isn't the place for that kind of thing and I'm worried that that lead-in will kill off James Corden's show, which I'm beginning to like a lot. Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 until Colbert is ready? My second choice would have been to air Letterman reruns and my third choice would have been to have guest hosts like they did to fill in between Craig Ferguson and Corden. Why aren't they doing any of that?

Well, first off, it's not just The Mentalist going into that time slot. There will also be Big Brother reruns and some original programming at that hour before Dr. Colbert takes up residence. Secondly, if you leave aside Letterman's last few weeks when his ratings were way up due to the big Grand Finale, Mentalist reruns are drawing about the same numbers he did…with a show that cost a lot more to put on.

Years ago, a fellow I knew in programming told me a theory he had. He was not involved in programming late night but if he'd ever gotten in there — this was at ABC — he planned to push to forget about talk shows and put on hour dramas instead. I'll try to explain his working premise here…

Late night is all about keeping people from going to bed. A lot of the "battle" between Jay and Dave was not about who could get more people to tune in at 11:35. It was who could get those viewers to stick around longer. During the time Dave was beating Jay, Jay was often getting more viewers from 11:35 to 11:50 (i.e., the monologue) and then Dave would dominate the next 45 minutes as Jay's audience went to bed or switched to something else, including Dave. When Jay overtook Dave, a lot of that was because Jay's viewers were just sticking around longer.

On a late night talk show, every time you conclude a segment, a chunk of your viewing audience turns in for the night. You might turn off a talk show halfway through because you have no interest in the second guest…and a pretty hefty portion of those watching Jay or Dave did that. On the other hand, if you watch a detective show halfway through, you're less likely to turn it off. It's unsatisfying to not find out whodunnit or to see the bank robbers get caught. Folks can say, "Let's watch the first part of Jimmy Fallon before we go to sleep." They're not as likely to say, "Let's watch the first part of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation."

At least, that was his theory…and as some of you remember it was tried, pre-Letterman, at CBS. They scheduled cop show reruns under the blanket title of Crime Time After Prime Time. It wasn't a total failure but getting a hit talk show in there looked like a better use of the time. (My friend's answer was that CBS ran the wrong cop shows there — ones selected for their cheapness than their quality. "Talk shows fail when they aren't any good either," he noted.)

That friend is no longer in programming but the ratings the last week or so for The Mentalist would suggest that his theory is not wholly without merit. That will not stop The Coming of Colbert but if as some predict America just tires of all talk shows some day, we might see more of this, at least at 11:35. I have a hunch people would not commit at 12:35 to watching an hour show you kinda have to see through to the end. Then again, as DVR usage becomes more commonplace, the actual times that shows air become increasingly less significant.

(I would guess that if you put a show like that on at 12:35, most people would simply not start watching because they wouldn't want to commit to staying up until 1:35, whereas they can start watching a talk show at that hour and bail when they get sleepy. Originally, back in the Steve Allen days, that was the reason for putting talk shows at 11:30 but the country now stays up later than it used to. That's why TV stations no longer sign off for the night.)

I wouldn't worry about Corden. He's probably getting a big Get Out of Jail Free card right now. If his ratings were to tank — and they haven't yet — CBS would not blame him for being unable to hold an atypical lead-in. They'd just say, "Well, he's not compatible with the shows we have on now. Let's wait and see how he does after Colbert." Once the new Late Show debuts and goes through a few months to find its levels and get the bugs out, that's when Corden will face his real test.

A show in his slot is judged mainly by how well it maintains the viewing levels of the last fifteen minutes of the show before it. He's not expected to hold all of it but trouble is afoot if he loses most of it. If Colbert's show is a hit and Corden keeps a reasonable portion of the viewership he inherits each night, he'll be fine. Personally, I think that's the most likely outcome of the change. If Colbert flops — which I sure don't expect — then poor ratings for Corden will be the fault of his lead-in, not him. So he's in a pretty good position.

Why they didn't put on Letterman reruns? My understanding is that Dave didn't want that. He wanted his end to be clean…and he owns those shows.

Why didn't they move Corden up to 11:35 for the interim? Well, this is speculation but maybe Colbert didn't want that. What if James did great at 11:35 and then Stephen came on and didn't do as well? It may also be that CBS views Corden as long-range work-in-progress and wanted to keep him in the Minor League (so to speak) until he's more ready for the Big Time.

Why didn't they have several months of guest hosts? Probably because it would have meant assembling an entire staff and production crew and finding a studio and building a set. The guest hosts who followed Ferguson used his stage, his set, his crew, etc. Letterman's set-up though had to be dismantled right away to begin prepping for Colbert so that was not an option. Filling with guest hosts would have been a lot more expensive than running The Mentalist and whatever else they'll have on there. And it just may be that someone at CBS wanted to audition a return to late-night hour dramas just in case Colbert doesn't beat any Jimmies.

John Cleese on Twitter…