You're not supposed to wish folks a Happy Memorial Day since Memorial Day is a time of mourning and remembrance. Then again, judging from my e-mailbox this morning, it's also a time of really great bargains if I rush to my nearby Target store, order new underwear from Hanes or pounce on any of several dozen Memorial Day Sales. And you don't even have to have lost a loved one in the military to take advantage of them.

As a kid, I was a little fuzzy on what you're supposed to do on Memorial Day except remember, and how it differs from Veterans Day in November. Wikipedia — which as we all know is never wrong about anything — tells us "Memorial Day is not to be confused with Veterans Day; Memorial Day is a day of remembering the men and women who died while serving, while Veterans Day celebrates the service of all U.S. military veterans."

So we mourn the dead on one and celebrate them all on the other. Seems to me there's a gap in there. On which one do we acknowledge the sacrifice of those who didn't die while serving but did suffer lasting injuries and disabilities, including the emotional kind? There are an awful lot of them and we don't seem to do right by those folks. And while they should be remembered, that's not enough. They should also be helped and not just with a twenty-four hour sale at Lowe's.

Remembering these folks is, literally, the least we can do. There is no gesture or action that demands less of us than to remember.

Here's a reprise from 9/7/04. Amazingly, the links in it are still good. Since then, I've read a lot more FBI reports that have leaked out onto the net and they all seem to be like Dean Martin's, full of info that wouldn't even satisfy the accuracy stands of TMZ or Sean Hannity. Makes you wonder how the bureau has ever caught anyone…

I was just browsing over at one of my favorite sites, The Smoking Gun. The folks there manage to dig up a wide array of suppressed or otherwise unavailable documents which they gleefully make available to all. One of the many categories, and perhaps the most amazing, presents a stash of old FBI dossiers. Your government actually spent (and probably still spends) your tax dollars to compile "files" on prominent people…and judging from the ones that are available, these files contain a mix of readily-available info — the kind of thing you can find in the person's professional bio — mixed with gossip, much of it blind-sourced and often inaccurate.

In 1972, a report on Dean Martin was requested by Alexander P. Butterfield, the Deputy Assistant to the President. We will forever be grateful to Mr. Butterfield for it was he who revealed the existence of the taping system installed by his boss, Richard M. Nixon. Butterfield was probably following orders, maybe even Nixon's, when he ordered this paperwork…and you can read what he received here. As you'll see, it consists of some common knowledge plus some unsourced gossip, including some scanty evidence that Mr. Martin was gay. While I obviously can't swear this is not true, I did know Craig — one of several children Dino fathered — and Craig used to tell pretty authentic-sounding stories of his old man bedding a steady stream of famous ladies. None of that info is in the report but I was especially amused at this paragraph…

So here's the question: Should we be more outraged that our government assembled this kind of info on citizens? Or that they relied on such vague and probably inaccurate sources? And how about that sloppy redacting job, blacking out what appears after Dean Martin's name in the above? The censored section is followed by "were," which tips us that there's another name under there. That means that the word after Dean Martin's name is "and" then we presumably have a first name, a space, then a last name. Since this document was typed in a non-proportional spaced font, it's easy to look at the line above and figure out that the name that was blacked-out has ten letters.

Okay, it's 1955 and some source mentions a name with ten letters in the same breath as Dean Martin. Gee, I wonder who that could be.

A ten-letter name — probably the same one — is blacked-out on the first page where it says Dean and someone else made a pornographic record in May of 1956. Hmm…who was Dean Martin working with in May of 1956 who had ten letters in his name? That's too early for Joey Bishop. Can you think of anyone who might have been in a recording studio with Dean in May of 1956? (Hint: Dean and his partner played their last professional engagement at the Copacabana in New York on July 24, 1956.)

And back on the second page of the report, it looks like a ten-letter name has also been redacted in the sentence about names being found in a book of alleged clients for a homosexual prostitution ring. I'm guessing it's the same ten-letter name each time and that they did make the dirty record but that the gay stuff is an outright lie which someone in your Federal Bureau of Investigation took seriously. The guy who compiled this was inept and so was whoever was assigned to cross-out the name of Martin's cohort to conceal his identity. One hopes they do a better job of protecting the identity of mob informants.

It is worth noting that this report is dated August of 1972. The infamous FBI boss, J. Edgar Hoover — who gathered smut on people— died in May of that year. Still, the information in the document is from the FBI files so it was almost certainly collected on Hoover's watch…even though, as it notes, there was no formal investigation of Martin. I really, really hope that the many intelligence failures we've experienced lately in this country weren't because the bureau was busy gathering this kind of poop on Harry Connick, Jr.

I never met Anne Meara. I just always liked Anne Meara. She was bright and funny and good in everything she ever did. That's all I wanted to say.

The Broadway show The Wiz is soon to have a Broadway revival and a live television production. (Hey, did you know it was once almost a DC Comic? When the movie version was about to come out, they hired me to adapt it and I had to trudge up to Universal Studios and see a rough cut of the movie and then write an adaptation and they hired Dan Spiegle to draw it and when he was around page 26 or so, someone told them the film was going to be a bomb and they called Dan and told him to stop drawing because they weren't going to publish the comic. And they didn't. Dan, by the way, drew a dynamite Nipsey Russell.)

Anyway, it's always been an interesting bit of theater history how close that show — which won the Tony for Best Musical the year it debuted — came to closing in about three days. Playbill has just posted a 1975 article all about this for those of you who want to know the story.

Here's what I believe is David Letterman's first post-finale interview. There may be a brief ad but it's worth sitting through to get to the interviewer's first question which Dave obviously enjoys…

Here's a new interview with Art Garfunkel. In it, he says "I don't want to say any anti Paul Simon things," and he said this before and after he said a number of anti Paul Simon things. I don't know how many reunions those two guys have had — twenty or thirty — but it may be a while before the next one.

Here's a post from June 23, 2003. If I was writing it today, I would make more of the success that the Archie company has had over the years with their digest line. I'm told it kept that company alive for a long time and the fact that it no longer works as well as it once did is why they're floundering about, trying stunts to refurbish a very old, outta-date property. I would also include a remark I once heard from Jack Kirby. Jack liked things big. He liked big comics and big panels and big scenes and big concepts. When DC started their "super-size" lines of comics with a larger-than-usual page size, he was thrilled with the concept…and disappointed that they started by filling them with reprints of old comics, thereby not taking advantage of that bigger canvas.

Anyway, one time Jack looked at a Gold Key Digest and he said, speaking just of the page size, "That's a terrible thing to do to comics." He wasn't wrong but I still find something fun about those books.

Back in the sixties, Western Publishing Company (Gold Key Comics) began to have increasing problems getting their comics distributed. All the publishers were having this problem but it was most acute for Western. DC and Charlton owned their own distribution companies so they were able to push a little harder and at least they were paying their distribution fees to themselves. Marvel was distributed by DC until they jumped to a company owned by the same conglomerate that owned Marvel. The other companies, like Archie and Harvey, were hurt…but they (like DC and Marvel) were largely using their comic book publishing as a loss leader for the merchandising of the properties depicted in their comics. DC didn't consider it fatal when sales on the Batman comic went down since they were making money off Batman t-shirts and games and spatulas and such.

Western, however, did not control their own distribution, nor did they make any money off the merchandising of most of the characters in their comics. They had the Disney properties, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — all properties owned by others. The few comics Western did own did not yield any real licensing money.

So they began hustling to find a way to sell comics in other venues — bookstores, toy stores, anywhere. They explored other forms of distribution and to this end began experimenting with different sizes and shapes of comics. Long before anyone at DC or Marvel was ready to break from the conventional funny book format, Western tried oversize comics, paperback comics, comics bundled in plastic bags and a few other ideas. Some received limited test marketings or never made it that far. Others came out and were widely ignored. The one thing that did well for a time was the digest comic — a little paperback about 6 and 3/4" tall with (usually) a little under 200 pages. Today, the Archie people have done quite well with their digests and the rumor is that other companies are gearing up to try them — especially for "funny" comics, whose less-detailed pages suffer less when reduced in size.

I don't believe this format will ever catch on big. Archie's success with it has largely been a matter of skillful (and expensive) marketing. They've managed to get excellent display in airports and at supermarket checkout counters. It often costs a lot of money to get your wares into those locations…which can accept very limited amounts of product. I also think there's a fundamental problem with the format in that its very size makes comics look cheap and unimportant.

One thing that some publishers seem to have missed is a lesson that Western learned when they were the only publisher doing them. When the digests were successful, they were only successful in stores that were completely isolated from regular-size comics. If a store had both sizes, no one bought the digests. If a store didn't carry regular-size comics but the one across the street did, no one bought the digests. I forget the actual sales numbers I was shown but it was something like this: When no regular-sized comics could be purchased nearby, a store that carried the digests might expect a 75% sale, which was very good. If the same store had regular comics, the digests would sell 10%. Therefore, Western was in the odd position of trying very hard not to distribute one of their products to some outlets. This they did until the digests died out in the early-seventies — about the time DC and Marvel were both enjoying some success with larger-than-normal comics. Western's distribution was crashing anyway by then but I've often wondered if the appearance of the tabloid "super-size" comics made the digests just look so puny that they helped finish them off.

If you were horrified by that Fiddler on the Roof medley performed by The Temptations, you probably won't want to watch much the same thing performed by the Osmond Brothers…

Matt Kuhns writes…

Out of curiosity I have to ask, why are you so convinced that the GOP won't nominate Jeb Bush, now? I just don't see how blustering in ways that seem (to you, and to me) imbecilic and embarrassing will be worrisome to Republican primary-goers. My own observations are that they seem, rather, to demand it.

Well, I'm not convinced they won't nominate him. They have to nominate someone. He just no longer seems like the likely guy to me. Of course, right now, no one does.

I just think that, first of all, Jeb Bush has lately looked like a really bad campaigner — a guy who gives an answer on Monday, hedges it on Tuesday and reverses it on Wednesday. I don't think any party likes a nominee who does that and it's worse with a faction of the Republican party that seems to thinks it's a sign of leadership to state a firm position and never, ever budge even a millimeter off it. (Democrats sometimes seem to have the opposite problem. On those rare occasions when one of them takes a firm position, he or she loses few points within the party for backing away from it.)

The other problem Bush has is that the current Republican Party is running far from the position that George W. Bush was a good president and that he made all the right calls in Iraq. Even "he was misled by bad intelligence" is a pretty feeble excuse…one that the people offering it to defend Bush would not accept with regard to any foreign policy miscall made by Obama or anyone named Clinton. It's going to be pretty awkward if not impossible for Jeb Bush to distance himself from all that, especially when the Democrats have video of Bush saying he turns to his brother for advice on dealing with other nations.

Speaking of all this: It's fine when the press asks candidates what they would have done about Iraq but I'd like to hear a few of them also asked what they would do (present and future-tense) about Iran. I dunno…I'm thinking in some vague, remote way that might be relevant to the job of being the 45th President of the United States.

As I'm sure you've heard, Ireland has legalized Gay Marriage by a pretty resounding majority vote. One hopes that opponents of that kind of thing in this country will realize that if that's the view of a nation as solidly Catholic as Ireland, that's the way the civilized world is headed and it ain't going back.

For years now, we've been hearing foes of Gay Marriage tell us that it will lead to the destruction of Straight Marriage, waves of Polygamy and men marrying cocker spaniels — all this then trumped by an angry God sending hell and damnation unto us all. Shouldn't there be a Statute of Limitations on those kinds of warnings? It's been eleven years since Massachusetts began allowing same-gender couples to wed. There have been no reports of Straight Marriage going bye-bye and no evidence of Polygamy replacing it, nor has The Lord rained down burning sulfur on Boston. How long is this supposed to take and at what point does intellectual honesty require that its prophets admit that maybe it just might not happen?

George Daugherty is the gent who conducts symphony orchestras to underscore the screening of old Warner Brothers cartoons. Here's an article about how and why he does this.

The other night, Carolyn and I were in an Albertsons Market and while passing the dairy case, I happened to notice something. This is their 2% milk but it was the same situation with all the different kinds of milk they were selling. As you may be able to see from the above photo I grabbed, you have your Albertsons house brand on the top shelf and a container of it is $3.99. On the shelf below, you have Foremost brand for $3.29.

I don't get this. They're the exact same milk.

I don't mean similar. I mean the same. The codes on the containers show they come from the exact same plant on the exact same day — and I don't think that plant has two grades of cows…

"Harry, make sure you don't get the milk mixed up. Remember that the milk from Bossie and Flossie goes into the $3.99 bottles and the milk from Bessie and Tessie goes into the $3.29 bottles. Bossie and Flossie give much better milk and we have to charge more for it!"

No, that's the exact same milk in the exact same containers. Only the label is different and for the Albertsons label, you pay 70 cents more.

I've mentioned this before. I see this almost every time I go to a market. The Whole Foods outlets around town here sell my favorite drinking water, Crystal Geyser, side-by-side with the Whole Foods house brand which is bottled for them by Crystal Geyser. Same facility, same water, same container, different label. In this case, the Crystal Geyser gallon is $1.49 and the same thing with the house brand label is 99 cents. Actually, the Albertsons-Foremost situation is the first time I've seen the house brand cost more but the point is that there's a shelf with a product…and then next to it or above it is the exact same thing with a different label and a higher price.

Presumably, there are people who go to the dairy case at Albertsons, see the two different shelves of milk and think, "Hey, I'll save seventy cents and buy the cheaper brand!"

And there are people who look at them both and think, "I'll buy the Albertsons brand because since it costs more, it's probably better milk!" (For those who view the world the latter, illogical way, Albertsons also sells Alta-Dena brand milk for a buck more a gallon…but at least that's from a different plant. It could perhaps be better milk in some way.)

Plus, I'm guessing there are people who don't notice that there are two choices (three, counting the Alta-Dena option) and just grab one without looking at the price.

I would love to know how the marketing folks think this works and what the sales are like. They know it's the same milk and that it helps them to have it out there with two different labels. Why is this effective for them?

David Letterman's set is history but you can still visit it at this link. Click your way all around. You can even go backstage.

The Dustbowl Revival is a great, old-style musical group. Here's a music video of one of their recent recordings, shot at the home of their friends, Dick and Arlene Van Dyke. That's Dick and Arlene dancing as the stars of it. Arlene is a talented makeup artist who is now getting into performing and she's very good at it. Her husband has done some of that performing stuff, too…