From 1984 through 1986, I wrote a comic called Crossfire, which was one of my all-time favorite projects. I co-created the character with my friend Will Meugniot and the book was drawn by another friend, Dan Spiegle. It was published by a small publisher called Eclipse that after a few issues had trouble paying me because it was having trouble getting paid by its dealers and distributor…and there were other problems, like a flood that wiped out the company's office and most of its assets.

If we'd gotten paid in full for every copy sold, I think it might still be going…but that didn't happen. For the last half of its run, I wasn't getting paid much and sometimes nothing but I didn't care. I was having too much fun to stop. When we reached the stage where Dan, the letterer and the colorist might not get paid properly, I shut it down…reluctantly. A lot of people told me they missed it and the little essays I wrote in the back, which were not unlike a lot of things I now write on this blog.

One person who told me he missed the comic was a wonderful gent named Archie Goodwin, who was then the editor of the Epic (creator-owned) line for Marvel. I was already doing Groo for them and one day at a comic convention in Texas, Archie took me to lunch and said he wanted a book like Crossfire in his line. He said, "Come up with something you can do with Dan Spiegle and we'll publish it." That was a nice offer so when I got home, I invented a comic that was more science-fictiony and super-heroic than Crossfire. I figured that was what Marvel would like…and I had a premise that would allow me to do the same kinds of stories that people, or at least Archie, seemed to like about Crossfire.

I wrote a script, Dan drew about eight pages and at the next convention Archie and I both attended, I presented them to him. The next day of the con, we met for lunch and I learned that having a proposal rejected by Archie Goodwin was a more pleasant experience than having one accepted by some editors I've known. He essentially said, "I like this a lot and I'll buy it if this is the book you want to do but I was hoping for something with no super-heroics or s-f or fantasy in it."

He went on to explain that the folks at Marvel in charge of such things were looking for something that might snag young women aged 16-24 who, research told them, were not attracted to the current Marvel line. The company was working out a deal to put a small comics display near the section of many bookstores and newsstands that sold Harlequin Romances and other (allegedly) female-directed publications. The problem, he said, was that Marvel really didn't have the right product to put on it.

"Give me something set in Hollywood with adventure and soap opera overtones," Archie requested. He mentioned the newspaper strip, On Stage, which he loved and which he'd written for a time. "Something like that," he said, and he suggested I try to get the word "Hollywood" into the title.

That afternoon, I took a long walk to mull, then went back to my room and wrote down some notes for a book called Hollywood Superstars. Archie and I talked it out the next day and he said, before I'd written a page of it or Dan even knew of its existence, "You've got a deal."

He made two requests of a creative nature. In Crossfire, the title character drove a light blue 1957 Thunderbird, in part because I was then driving a light blue 1957 Thunderbird. Archie wanted one of the Hollywood Superstars to drive a light blue 1957 Thunderbird. "Fine with me," I said. The other request was that I not yield to the temptation to introduce fantasy or super-heroics into the book. He had a hunch about a potential new audience that could be reached if I didn't drive them off by trying to attract the Wolverine fans. "Now, you've got a deal," I told him.

But as it turned out, neither of us had a deal — a deal on paper, anyway. The terms were fairly simple and quite standard but it somehow took close to a year to work out the minor points. We would literally spend less time writing and drawing Hollywood Superstars than we did waiting for the contract. By the time it arrived and we could begin work, two big things had changed at Marvel. One was that Archie had left. The other was that no one there seemed to have any interest in a rack near where they sold Harlequin Romances or in chasing that elusive female readership. There didn't even seem to be any interest at that moment in publishing anything that wouldn't attract Wolverine fans.

Which was their right. In hindsight, I kinda wish they'd come to me and said, "Look, we know our editor asked you for this comic but our publishing interests have changed and we don't think we can sell it right now. How about if we work with you and Mr. Spiegle to come up with something we do want to publish?" I'm skeptical that Hollywood Superstars would have sold well even if Marvel had been gung-ho excited about publishing it. Not in that marketplace, not without something like Archie's proposed alternative marketing plan. But I knew for sure it wouldn't sell if the folks at Marvel disliked the whole concept as much as some of them seemed to dislike it. Alas, they didn't propose any alternative deal. Instead, they sent me a schedule of when to deliver the first issue of Hollywood Superstars…so Dan and I went to work.

As I recall, they had the right to cancel after #4 and I told Dan that was all we'd probably do. For some reason, we wound up doing five before they pulled the plug. My guess? Someone there just got too busy and forgot to cancel it sooner.

I hope none of this sounds like I'm complaining. At the time, a few things bothered me, most notably a very rude (and wholly unnecessary) phone call I received from one of the Marvel editors up there. He acted like I had somehow tricked Marvel into publishing a comic they didn't want to publish and suggested that if I thought that was what Marvel readers wanted to buy, I really didn't understand the comic book industry. A year or so later, he came up to me at Comic-Con, told me Archie Goodwin had explained the whole thing to him, and he apologized. So that stopped bothering me.

The thing that did for a long time was the color separation work on the book. Back before we had computer coloring, back when this book was done, colorists colored stats of the pages and then a color separator would convert that work to negatives that could be burned onto printing plates. Marvel worked with some firms that did that very well but they had a few that did poor-to-mediocre work. Hollywood Superstars was assigned to one of the latter kind and they did such bad separations that Dan, colorist Tom Luth and I can barely stand to look at the printed books. If you ever do, trust me: Tom did the usual excellent job you see on the other comics he's colored.

But happily, neither you nor I nor anyone has to look at those badly-reproduced comics now to read the stories in Hollywood Superstars. Nat Gertler's About Comics has just issued a collection of all five stories in black-and-white. (No, the essays are not included but most of them are on this site.) I just got mine and I enjoyed it a lot, especially the nice back cover blurb from one of the best writers in comics today, Kurt Busiek.

This is the extent of the Hard Sell you'll get out of me. If you'd like to purchase a copy, here's the link. Hope you use it. Hope you like what you get. If nothing else, the artwork by Dan Spiegle is superb.

I have a bunch of messages asking me to weigh in on the Amazon-Hachette squabble. Well, I would if I felt I understood it well enough to have a firm opinion. I do note that most of my author friends are siding with Hatchette so that might well be where I'd land…but that's only if I really felt I had a grasp of the issues, which I don't. Yet. So far, I like the analogy where you're standing on the street watching King Kong and Godzilla fighting to the death atop some skyscrapers and someone comes up to you and asks, "Which side are you rooting for?"

The correct answer is, "Neither! I'm just hoping neither one crushes me."

I read the latest Amazon statement and taken just by itself, it seems to make a lot of sense except where it tries to invoke and misquote George Orwell. And then I read the latest Hachette statement and taken just by itself, it seems to make a lot of sense. When taken together, you find yourself thinking the truth is somewhere in the middle…and that's not necessarily right, either.

I think it's a natural human trait to seek truth in the center but it's not always there. If Stanley thinks Oliver owes him $300 and Oliver thinks he owes Stanley $100, the truth is not automatically $200. One of those guys may just be totally wrong. People try to settle disputes like that all the time and it's sometimes applicable…but not always. Imagine we were arguing over when Abraham Lincoln was born and I said 1809 and you said 1813. That would not mean Honest Abe was born in 1811.

I'm going to wait and see if (a) I learn enough about what this is all about to have an opinion or (b) I don't have to because it gets settled soon. The latter would be nice for all concerned and it would save me the time 'n' trouble of understanding it all.

There is perhaps someone somewhere on the Internet who is capable of producing musical notes and hasn't uploaded their interpretation of "Bohemian Rhapsody." Here is Surrey Harmony's Barbershop version. Don't miss the part where they smash their guitars. (I'm not kidding. They actually smash their guitars…)

I very much enjoyed the Dick Cavett special on Watergate. It runs many times on PBS channels the next few days and I suggest you grab a viewing while you can.

Reading as much as I have about Nixon and that scandal in particular, I've always been a bit uncomfy with the attempts to psychoanalyze the man. Too often, I see people try to draw direct lines between certain known facts of his childhood and certain actions he took as President of the United States…or on his way to becoming that. The connections simultaneously seem too pat and too strained, and I'm never quite sure of their relevancy. I just think people are too complicated to be completely explained that way.

Nevertheless, it's obvious that so much of the Watergate Horrors, as some called them, were rooted in Nixon's personality and paranoias. Even when he clearly had the '72 election in the proverbial bag, he and his men were still willing to cast ethics aside and even hijack campaign donations that might have gone to elect more Republicans, just to run up the score and extract some vengeance from anyone who'd ever opposed or faulted him. It was the "them or us" mindset that ultimately became self-destructive.

Years after Watergate, I worked on a TV show where the producer/showrunner had a seething hatred for The Network. Every third sentence out of his mouth was about how inept and treacherous The Network was and I found myself not only on staff but within a kind of "bunker mentality" founded on contempt for those outside the bunker.

Within this environment, if you somehow failed at your assignment, it was not acceptable to go to the producer and say, "Sorry, I couldn't do it." What you had to say, as everyone learned, was: "I had it working but then those assholes at The Network sabotaged me." That was not only acceptable but it endeared you to the producer. You were part of the team, having spilled blood in the war that he fought day and night on the show…and sometimes in his mind.

Not that the excuse was always wrong. The Network did have the ability to screw up its programs, usually by incompetence more than deliberate subversion…although there were instances of the latter. But The Network wasn't always at fault. We on the staff could botch things up ourselves quite nicely and did. And when you did, you blamed The Network because that was always believed and, of course, it was a bonding experience with your employer and it make him — the producer/showrunner — loathe The Network all the more.

I watched this for a few weeks with the nagging feeling I knew it from somewhere and then it hit me: The Talent Coordinator blaming The Network for not being able to book Charo was like the Nixon White House Aide blaming The Press for his inability to carry out some presidential order. (The Nixon by Nixon documentary on HBO includes an excerpt from the tapes with Nixon saying over and over, "The press is the enemy! The press is the enemy!") One of the reasons Nixon hated his enemies so was that he was always willing, maybe even eager to believe they were screwing him.

There's a quote from some famous general about how to key to success in battle is to neither overestimate nor underestimate your enemy. You can get killed making either mistake, though underestimating is usually the greater error. In the entire tale of Richard M. Nixon, I've seen only one moment when he seemed to buy into that. It was that moment in his farewell speech where he said goodbye to the White House staff before flying off to exile. He said…

Always remember that others may hate you but those who hate you don't win unless you hate them. And then you destroy yourself.

That sounds like an admission that he'd done just that but I wonder. With Nixon, you always had to wonder.

I've been watching a number of Watergate history specials and having a wonderful time wallowing. That was a fascinating time in this country and there was much to be learned about human nature, politics, the essence of America and many other topics. Amazingly, information is still coming out about it all and we're learning more about it…and not in the way that, for example, new "information" miraculously emerges about the Kennedy Assassination to bolster new conspiracy theories. John W. Dean has a new book in which he painstakingly transcribed passages of the fabled Nixon Tapes to tell more of the story. Dean and Bob Woodward have an interview running on CSpan2 this weekend that my TiVo is awaiting.

In this interview, Dean goes over some points in his book, one of which is that for all his expertise at politics, Richard Nixon was not very bright when it came to managing scandals. Others have suggested it flowed from an insane paranoia at ever having any failings pointed out, which in turn was why he hated the press so. Nixon doesn't seem to have hated just the portions of the press that had ever been openly hostile to him. He hated the whole idea of anyone writing about him who was out of his control. The whole idea of taping his private conversations seems to have come from that; so if Henry Kissinger somehow got credit for a sound Nixon decision, Nixon could haul out the tapes, edit them judiciously and say, "Here, listen to this!" Ultimately, of course, it was not the existence of those tapes but the fact that he couldn't selectively edit and release them that ruined his reputation and presidency.

The new tapes that are now being played and transcribed make Nixon look petty, childish and at times, very antisemitic. There's a terrific special running on HBO these days that plays excerpts of many of them in understandable context. It's called Nixon by Nixon: In His Own Words. I'm saving that one. Also looking forward to Dick Cavett's Watergate, which debuts tonight on most PBS stations. Will Harris, who often sends in items for this blog, says it's great and he interviewed Cavett about it.

All these shows continue to largely overlook my favorite Watergate figure. Some time here, I wrote…

Nixon's most prominent supporter, at least during the Watergate mess, was a rabbi named Baruch Korff, a man of sterling reputation and sincerity, though he was largely clueless about Washington and the president he backed. Given Nixon's power and '72 landslide, you would have thought his chief public defender would have been some G.O.P. biggie — a senator or governor but no. All those guys dove under their desks when evidence of Nixonian lawlessness began to leak, especially when it was revealed that endless hours of private Nixon conversations might become public. Rabbi Korff rode in and filled the position nobody else wanted. Some nights, when newsmen had to report the latest bad news for Nixon and they looked around for a spokesperson who could defend the then-president, Korff was often the only human being willing to go on camera in that role. That was a big part of what doomed Nixon: Few Republicans wanted to tether their futures to his…and Rabbi Korff, who wound up making the public case for R.M.N. was a thoroughly inept advocate.

Korff had an impossible job. It was bad enough that he had to explain "Nixon's side" of so many revelations without knowing what it was…or would be. (Nixon's strategy seemed to be to let all the bad stuff come out, then try to weave an innocent, self-exonerating explanation.) What made the Rabbi's chore even harder was that as Oval Office conversations leaked or were officially released, so was all that presidential anti-semitism. Korff discounted it, explaining it couldn't be so — never mind what Nixon actually said — because of the president's strong support of Israel. That was a weak defense — the "some of my best friends" gambit. And now we have these new tapes showing how Nixon admired Israeli Jews and distrusted their American counterparts. Exactly what you would have expected of the man. It's amazing how "readable" he was in these regards, just as it's amazing how Rabbi Korff turned out to be wrong about darn near everything.

No one will ever make it but I thought there was a great movie there. Rabbi Korff had some self-promotional reasons for doing what he did but at times, I saw no one else on the TV Watergate coverage who didn't seem primarily concerned with saving his own butt. He genuinely seemed baffled at how Washington and the press corps operated, and distressed that so few of those who'd supported Nixon when it was personally advantageous were willing to stick their necks out for him when he was under attack. The newly-scrutinized tapes make a good case that hiding under one's desk, as so many one-time Nixon allies did, was a sound strategy.

Here's forty minutes of footage of the construction of Disneyland, complete with many shots of Walt himself. It's amazing how fast they built the place…

I am currently on a quest to get the Avast Software company to cancel my subscription to its virus-checking program and to refund my money on an add-on product of theirs that just plain wouldn't install on my computer. This is not easy. You can phone their Tech Support department 24/7 and you can phone their Billing department during certain hours but neither department has the power to do anything about cancellations or refunds. That is handled only by submitting a particular kind of Support Ticket…and they kinda hide the submission link on their website. Then they promise to get back to you in 2-3 working days…and don't.

What do you do when they don't respond to your Support Ticket? Why, you submit another Support Ticket, of course.

There are many websites that test Virus Checkers and tell you which ones perform best. I'd like to see a website that reports on how easy it is to cancel your subscription. This is not the first time I've had this problem.

Today is two weeks since I started trying to cancel Avast and I have received no response from them other than robotic messages telling me they'd received my latest Support Ticket and I'd hear from them in 2-3 working days. Oh — I did get one message from a guy in Tech Support asking me to write out everything I told three different Avast Tech Support people on the phone before they all gave up on helping me get the product installed. It's starting to look like I need a special Virus Checker that will protect me from other Virus Checkers.

I know I've said most of this before but (happily) Freberg keeps on having birthdays so I want to wish him more. Stan Freberg was and still is a master at doing voices for cartoons, recording hilarious and best-selling satirical records, producing brilliant funny commercials, writing books and articles, and raising the bar as one of the cleverest minds in the world of entertainment. I am far from the only person who writes silly things for a living who counts him as a major inspiration.

I discovered his records via Soupy Sales. I'd watch Soupy every day. Every day, Soupy would have his puppets mime to some comedy record. Many days, it would be a record by Stan Freberg. Soupy shaped my sense of humor a little. Stan shaped it a lot.

He intersected with most of the things I loved as a kid. He was the other voice, the guy who wasn't Mel Blanc in a ton of Warner Brothers cartoons. He and the brilliant Daws Butler were Beany and Cecil and everyone else on Time for Beany. He was involved with the early MAD magazine. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And then there were those records of his, which I played often enough to now have a permanent library of every word of them lodged somewhere in my brain.

Every so often when I'm with him, he challenges me to recite the words from one of them. I have never failed this challenge.

But like I said before, I've said most of this before. So I'll just wish him and his wonderful wife Hunter a Happy Freberg Day and warn you that I'll probably say most of the same things next Freberg Day and the one after that and the one after that…

This time out, I'm going to tell the story of two of the best laughs I ever got in my life, one at age ten and one at twelve. They were both with the same joke and the person who laughed at it twice was my Uncle Aaron. He was a nice man — my father's sister's husband — who looked enough like Art Carney to be occasionally mistaken for him.

One time when we went to a crowded restaurant with him and Aunt Dot, we were surprised to be seated immediately, ahead of many other parties. As he passed out the menus to us, the host told Uncle Aaron how much he loved him on The Honeymooners. Uncle Aaron, who was afraid they'd rescind our preferential seating, said, "Thank you. I love working with Jackie Gleason."

As I've mentioned here, he sold window displays. If you had a small business, you could peruse his catalog and order little, relatively-inexpensive creations of wood, styrofoam and cloth to jazz up your store or front window. He offered low cost displays for all holidays and occasions. As Halloween approached, he sold a lot of witches and ghosts. As Thanksgiving neared, he sold turkeys and pilgrims. Christmas accounted for around 50% of his annual sales.

The displays were manufactured by a company in Japan and much of Uncle Aaron's life revolved around "The Japanese." He never spoke of his suppliers by name unless, I suppose, he was meeting with them, here or there. When he wasn't, it was "The Japanese are giving me trouble again" or "The Japanese overcharged me on that last shipment" or "The Japanese will be in town next week."

Even as a child, it struck me as bizarre to refer to his associates that way. He'd say, "The Japanese will be visiting my apartment on Saturday" and I'd say, "Really, Uncle Aaron? All of them?" And he never got it. He'd say, "Of course. The Japanese will be in town all next week. I'm taking them all to lunch on Monday." There was nothing racist about it. It was just shorthand. In the same way, he'd turn to his secretary and say, "Get Chicago on the phone!" and I'd think to myself, "Really? You're going to talk to the entire city?"

The displays were also designed in Japan, often from little sketches Uncle Aaron would doodle out and mail to them. He wasn't much of an artist but he'd draw a crude, almost-stick-figure snowman sunning himself under a cruder palm tree and then "The Japanese" would figure out what he had in mind and build it. A few times, he let me do the sketches and even at age 10, I was better than he was.

He had an office/warehouse down on Beverly Boulevard in what was then largely a Hispanic neighborhood but is now trending Korean. Once every few months, I'd spend the afternoon there. He'd assign me my own desk and I'd sit and draw or sit and read. Sometimes, Uncle Aaron would let me stuff catalogs into envelopes. Then he'd ridiculously overpay me for about an hour of work and I'd spend it all on comic books.

One day, "The Japanese" presented Uncle Aaron with a proposition. His supplier over there had acquired interest in a firm that could make full-sized mannequins for an absurdly low price. I do not remember the exact numbers but they went something like this. The top department stores were paying $100 and up for the kind of mannequin you dress in the clothes you're selling and place in your store window or on the floor. Via this new connection, Uncle Aaron could sell mannequins of the same size for $29.95 and still make a nice profit on each one.

"The Japanese" proposed a partnership arrangement whereby he would advertise and sell them in America. He made the deal which meant expanding his business considerably. Fortunately, the store next door to his office was for rent so it became the warehouse and shipping center for the mannequin side of his business. There was a considerable expenditure in setting up that store, staffing it and especially in advertising and mailings but he saw it as a great investment. And indeed, orders were soon rolling in and mannequins were arriving from Japan for him to repackage and ship to buyers.

You have probably seen a horror movie or suspense drama where someone is trapped in a warehouse full of mannequins. They walk nervously through it with eerie lighting and eerier music setting the mood. They glance from face to face, from silhouette to silhouette with the mounting terror that one or more of those mannequins might just be…alive?

Well, I got to play in just such a warehouse.

I have this odd memory of being alone in the warehouse at least once. I don't recall the circumstances that led to me being alone in there and probably it was for a matter of minutes as opposed to the hour or two I recall. But in the memory, I am ten and I'm wandering around amidst hundreds of nude, genital-less mannequins, females outnumbering males by about two to one. At that age, I was still trying to get clear on what women actually had under their clothing and nothing I saw there was any help. The whole thing was, like I said, odd.

It was not scary like in the movies because it lacked the ominous music and lighting…but it was odd. At one point, I turned to them and said aloud, "Okay, you can knock it off, guys. Move!" When they didn't move, I felt safer.

Mannequins today are, like everything else except tattoos and Joan Rivers, sexier. Female mannequins now look very much like the women in Playboy, which is partly a function of more realistic eyes and hair and makeup and a greater suggestion of reproductive organs on the mannequins. It's also partly a function of the women in Playboy looking more and more like they were sculpted out of papier-mâché. The mannequins in Uncle Aaron's warehouse were designed to be as non-offensive (i.e., non-sexy) as possible.

That was true of the ones on the north side of the warehouse, which were the ones that were all assembled, mostly for display purposes for when potential buyers came around. Less sexy were the ones on the west side of the warehouse. These were the ones in pieces, newly-arrived from Japan, which were to be shipped to buyers for assembly. Each of them was in nine parts — head, a two-part torso plus pairs of arms, hands and legs. Being low-cost mannequins, they had limited posing possibilities…but what did you want for $29.95?

Well, you might have wanted something sturdier. On the south side of the warehouse were the broken ones. What turned out to be an unacceptable percentage of them arrived from Japan in unsellable condition. The secret of the $29.95 price tag was that they were made with cheap material from cheap molds by poorly-paid employees and then were shipped over with inadequate packaging.

When a shipment of mannequins arrived from their maker, one would be missing a hand, one would have a leg that was busted, one would have a defective arm that wouldn't lock into place, etc. Uncle Aaron found he had to have his staff inspect and try assembling each one. Then they'd cannibalize, taking the head from this one and the arm from that one to turn three busted ones into one whole one. He would soon get into a lawsuit with "The Japanese" over this. They'd bill him, say, for one hundred mannequins. He'd pay for the seventy-one out of a hundred he considered complete. They finally sued him and in a counter suit, he charged that the product they were delivering to him was inferior to the samples he'd been shown when he agreed to the joint venture.

There were also many returns from buyers of mannequins that didn't live through their 90-day guarantee. The flesh-coloring would flake off or fingers would break or the torso would implode from the slightest bump. The metal fittings whereby one part locked to another would snap off and be unrepairable.

The mannequins may have had a 90-day guarantee but Uncle Aaron's new business didn't. In less than three months, he realized he was in trouble and for a simple reason: He was being delivered, and was therefore delivering to his customers, an inferior, shoddy product. That doesn't always put you out of business in this world but it did in Uncle Aaron's case.

Before long, it was all in the hands of lawyers. Eventually, there was a settlement and I never heard the terms but Uncle Aaron did refer to it as — and I quote: "A very expensive lesson." I wish some companies today would learn it.

My almost-final memory of Uncle Aaron's mannequin venture was the last day I spent in his office, watching and helping a bit as he and his few remaining employees packed to vacate the premises. He was leaving the mannequin biz behind and moving what was left of the window display operation to new quarters a few miles away. As he packed, he quoted to me what he said was an Old Jewish Curse. It went as follows: "May you have partners."

Uncle Aaron, by the way, was an Old Jew and he knew how to curse.

As he put the lid on one box, he asked me to give him a hand. My comedy impulses were starting to kick in at that age so I ran into the adjoining warehouse, came back with the hand (only) of one of the mannequins and gave it to him. He looked at it for a second, puzzled. Then he "got it" and began laughing uproariously.

It was one of those laughs that just went on and on. Tears — the good kind — came to his eyes and then he hugged me and said, "This whole business venture has been such a nightmare. But this almost makes it worth it." I didn't believe that but I was real happy I could do anything good for my Uncle Aaron. Real happy. A little later, he let me pack up a box of pads and pencils and other office supplies he wouldn't be needing so I could take them home. When he wasn't looking, I put a few of those stray mannequin hands into the box. Just in case.

This all happened in 1962. A few months later, and I'm not suggesting a connection, Uncle Aaron got sick and he underwent a series of operations. The first was certain to solve the problem but it didn't so he had the second one which was certain to solve the problem. It didn't so he had the third one which was certain to solve the problem, which led to the fourth one which was certain to solve the problem. By that point, even I knew how the problem would end and that it would not be long.

One day in 1964, my parents told me we were going to see Uncle Aaron in the hospital. They didn't say "This may be to say goodbye" but from their manner, I figured that part out. Since a visit to the hospital usually involved sitting around a waiting room for long periods, I packed a little bag of comic books and a pad of paper and my favorite doodling pen…and I took along something else. Just in case.

Uncle Aaron looked terrible there in the bed. The sheet didn't completely cover his chest and I could see terrible, ugly scars and stitching all over him. I tried to look at his face without looking at the scars but his face wasn't much more pleasant. You could see he was in pain — the physical kind and the emotional kind. The latter kind seemed to be worse.

We all talked for a little while and then I was sent out of the room so he could talk to my mother and father in private. I later learned he was asking them to take good care of the woman who would soon be his widow. And of course, they said yes.

Then he asked to have a moment alone with me. My mother and father went out and I went in. Uncle Aaron told me how proud he was of me and how he regretted he wouldn't be around to see what I would become but he was sure it would be impressive. He asked me to never forget about my Aunt Dot, the woman he loved so, and to do what I could to be of help to her, especially right after he was gone. The way he said it, I wondered if he expected this to happen within the hour.

It was all a lot for a child of twelve to hear and I remember thinking two things during it. One was to wonder if I should say something like, "You're not going anywhere. You'll be up and around in no time." I didn't believe that. I also knew he would never believe that. And I really knew that he would never believe I believed that. Still, I was thinking: Isn't that the kind of thing you're supposed to say in these situations?

I wasn't sure why but I decided not to say anything of the sort. Looking back, I suppose my instinct was that what he was telling me was very serious. This was perhaps the most serious moment of his life and if I'd said "Oh, you'll be fine," that would have been me not taking his seriousness seriously.

So I was thinking that and I was also thinking, "How can I get this man to ask me to give him a hand?" Because you know darn well what was in my bag with the comic books and the drawing pad.

As he finished his emotional plea to me to grow up right and to prosper and to care for Aunt Dot, he got a tad hoarse. On the table next to the bed, there was a little cup of club soda with a straw in it. He started to reach for it and I asked, "Do you need help?" and he said, "Yes, please, give me a hand!" I couldn't believe my luck.

I grabbed for my bag of stuff and out came the mannequin hand I'd brought. Uncle Aaron stared at it and began howling with laughter. Howling! I have never made anyone laugh like that in my life since then and I doubt I ever will again. My parents and a nurse came in to see what was happening. For a moment there, I thought maybe I'd harmed him somehow…perhaps hastened his demise. Then I thought, "No, he's not going to survive anyway. Maybe I've given him the chance to literally die laughing."

I thought he would have liked that. I know when I go, I'd like that.

He survived my joke, snickering and savoring it, and insisted on putting the mannequin hand on his bedside tray. That was the last time I ever saw him but Aunt Dot and one of his nurses both told me he couldn't look at it without laughing and feeling a little better. He died about two weeks after my visit.

Yeah, the hand thing was a silly joke but it wasn't bad for a kid that age…and it made 100% of its audience laugh, which is more than most jokes do.

When you're a kid, you can't do much to make your family happy. You can not get into trouble, and I almost never got into trouble, but you can't actually do anything. I was glad I could do something good for my Uncle Aaron. He did so many good things for me.

• Rupert Murdoch withdraws $80 billion offer for Time-Warner; decides to spend the money on one shopping spree at Whole Foods Market.

Several websites like this one are reporting that Craig Ferguson's replacement as host of CBS's Late, Late Show will be British star James Corden. I'm surprised even though I said here, "It…wouldn't surprise me if they went with someone who hasn't been mentioned on any of the 'Who'll Succeed Craig Ferguson?' lists. After all, Craig Ferguson wasn't on the 'Who'll Succeed Craig Kilborn?' lists."

The rumor mill, which has been wrong a lot about the filling of this vacancy, says that quite a few others were approached before they settled on Mr. Corden. This is, assuming they have settled on Mr. Corden. It doesn't feel official to me until Bill Carter announces it.

Speaking of Mr. Carter, who covers this beat for the New York Times, in an article about Stephen Colbert taking over Mr. Letterman's time slot, he had this to say…

CBS has not set a date yet for Mr. Letterman's exit, or Mr. Colbert's first night. But there will need to be a hiatus between the two — most likely for several months — as Mr. Colbert installs a new set to the theater and his staff moves in to old Letterman offices. The most likely plan is a farewell to Mr. Letterman at the end of May, with a September premiere for Mr. Colbert.

I am baffled by several things here, starting with the fact that Colbert leaves his Comedy Central show on December 17 of this year. Even if he starts on CBS on September 7, 2015 (the first Monday of that month), that would mean he'd be off regular television for 37 weeks. That's more than enough time to organize a new talk show and remodel the studio…but it's also more than enough time to lose a lot of one's popularity with the public and general momentum —

— especially if (and this leads us to another thing that baffles me) CBS fills the intervening 14 weeks with audience-losing filler programming. What is CBS going to put in that slot for all that time? Letterman reruns? Dave might not be leaving if there was more of an audience for Letterman reruns.

Getting back to James Corden, and still assuming it'll be James Corden, I have no opinion of how he'll do. I'll just say that he seems as unlikely a choice as Craig Ferguson was and Craig Ferguson worked out fine. Then again, he's also as unlikely a choice as Piers Morgan was to take over for Larry King…

This is an audio recording of a 2003 panel that ASIFA, the animation society, held to discuss the late, great Daws Butler. I have no idea why I wasn't there for it because I loved the guy and am still fascinated by him and his work. On the dais were June Foray and three voice actors who studied with Daws…Corey Burton, Joe Bevilacqua and Nancy Cartwright. Other students, including Earl Kress, chime in with their comments. As I've told many aspiring voice actors, it's too bad you can't study with Daws, but you can study Daws. He was the best — and a nicer, more generous-with-his-time-and-talents man you never knew…

It's the anniversary of Watergate with all sorts of rebroadcasts of that fun event. I've set my TiVo to record most of them, including a Dick Cavett special on PBS which I'm told is quite wonderful. C-Span is also rebroadcasting much of the hearings.

My friend Roger still refers to it as the time Democrats, for partisan reasons, drove a Republican president out of office. I think it's obviously a case of Republicans driving the guy out, lest he cripple the party for years to come. Keeping Nixon in the job was the gift that kept on giving to Democrats. They kept investigating the guy and finding more and more, winning over more of the nation. Why would they have wanted that to end, especially since it meant setting up a new president who could run as an incumbent in 1976?

It was Republicans who panicked because the issue of what had to be done about Richard M. Nixon was splitting their base. If I'd been a Republican congressperson or senator, I'd have been terrified of casting an ultimate vote on impeachment. If I'd voted with Nixon, I'd have lost half the Republican vote, as about half of all Republicans had decided Nixon was guilty of criminal actions and/or had become such a liability to the party that it was time to get rid of him. And if I'd voted against Nixon, I'd have lost the other half. The other half would have backed him if he'd started robbing liquor stores.

You cannot get elected in this country if you split your base…which is why a delegation of G.O.P. leaders went to the White House and told Nixon that Republicans in Congress would not stand allied behind him. Barry Goldwater, the man with the best credentials as a Republican, said he'd probably even vote against Nixon on at least one article of impeachment. Nixon knew that if he could no longer portray the whole investigation as a political witch hunt by the Dems, it was over. And so it was over.

I wonder how many of those calling for (or at least refusing to rule out) the impeachment of the current guy believe that would happen. I think most of them just know there are short-term advantages to telling certain constituents that they'll save America from the evil boogeyman they've made Obama out to be. But there are still people out there who think Obama committed High Crimes and Misdemeanors just by being elected and they're still trying to figure out how to make that sound more like actionable charges. I'm going to watch all those Nixon specials with that in mind.

In case you haven't guessed, it's another Mushroom Soup Monday here at newsfromme.com, meaning I'm busy writing cheese dip and/or lasagna jokes and haven't the time to update my blog with as much content as usual. Even this message is more than most people post on their blogs some weeks (hell, some months) so I feel not a dram of guilt. We will be back tomorrow in full force, probably with another long "family" remembrance. This one involved my Uncle Aaron and one of those warehouses full of old mannequins that you see in suspense movies. 'Til then…

My buddy Paul Harris discusses his encounters with Ted Nugent. I don't know Mr. Nugent and I'm not sure I've ever heard and/or enjoyed his music…but it strikes me that he has some bizarre views about guns and race and politics and — and the "and" is the big part — has discovered that voicing them is very, very good for business. I guess this puts him ahead of the people who only seem to be saying such things because it's good for business.