A number of folks wrote to suggest that yesterday's video clips of Vin Scully's five greatest "calls" didn't do justice to either Mr. Scully or those calls. Folks like Patrick Ford felt you couldn't appreciate Vinnie's poetry for the Kirk Gibson homer without seeing the whole thing. Here's the whole thing. You may also appreciate Scully's skill when contrasted to his co-commentator, Joe Garagiola. Garagiola was an okay sportcaster but he was no Vin Scully. He really has nothing to say but he says it anyway. Here's that famous moment of baseball…

And Bob Elisberg thinks I need to offer you the full version of Scully's famous radio description of Sandy Koufax's perfect game in '65. Bob writes, "What makes the Koufax call so stunning is not the "Strike three! Koufax has a perfect game," but what he says during the entire ninth inning. I've not only heard a tape of it, him setting up every single tense moment as if it was poetry, but I have a book of Great Baseball Writing and amid all these great writings, there is one chapter that is a transcript of Scully's play-by-play of the ninth inning, without a word changed, and it reads like great literature." Bob's right — as you'll hear if you click below…

For those of you who are interested to know what happened the other day when Dick Van Dyke's car burned up, his wife Arlene says this is an accurate account.

Vin Scully is expected to announce today or tomorrow that he'll come back for another season announcing Dodgers games. That'll make 65 seasons.

Let's think about that number for a second: 65 seasons. That would be impressive even if he wasn't any good at it.

I am not a fan of the Dodgers. I am not even much of a fan of baseball. Once upon a time, I had some interest in both largely because my father did. This was back when the Dodgers were Maury Wills, Frank Howard, Willie Davis, Tommy Davis, Jim Gilliam, Johnny Roseboro, Don Drysdale, and Duke Snider.

And — oh, yeah — Sandy Koufax.

Only one member of the team is still at it today: Vin Scully. No, he didn't put on the uniform but he was the single most indispensable person in the stadium when the Dodgers played. And I always suspected he was secretly managing the team. Walter Alston was officially the manager then but it was easy to imagine Alston, just sitting in the dugout during the game, listening to Vin Scully like everyone else in the place. I'd hear Scully say, "This is the time when Walt Alston is probably deciding to take out the pitcher and bring in Ron Perranoski to throw to the next batter" and I was sure Alston would listen to that, then turn to someone and say, "Bring in Ron Perranoski to throw to the next batter."

At least, it sure felt like that.

There's a certain beauty in anyone doing anything about as well as it can possibly be done. This is the beauty of Vin Scully. In the window below, you'll see what someone thought had been his five greatest "calls" as of the date this video was made. They're all gripping, exciting moments when games were won…and frankly, they miss the whole point of Vin Scully.

I mean, come on. It's the World Series. It's the bottom of the ninth with two outs. The Dodgers are two points down and they have two men on and who comes to the plate? Kirk Gibson, most likely at the suggestion of Vin Scully. Gibson is injured and ill. He was not expected to play at all. But he steps up to the plate, runs the count up to 3 and 2, then wallops a back door slider over the right field fence to win the game.

Exciting? Of course. And I could have called that "at bat" and made it exciting. So could you. That moment didn't need Vin Scully. You know what needs Vin Scully? When no one cares about anything happening on the field. The outcome of the game doesn't matter. One team is six runs ahead. The stands are two-thirds empty because even the people who showed up decided that the fifth inning was a good time to head home and beat the non-existent traffic. That's when somehow Vinnie manages to make it interesting. Even I sometimes listen to him then. What a great talker.

Here are five moments when he didn't matter, which is not to say they still aren't great moments in baseball — or in one case, football…

• Just started following Chris Matthews on Twitter (@hardball_chris). Very surprised he doesn't type in ALL CAPS.

Karl Rove has written an article for the Wall Street Journal pretending that Republicans have a real plan for health care if they can get rid of Obamacare. I don't believe they have one, I don't believe they want one and I don't believe they can get rid of Obamacare. Aaron Carroll explains why Rove's supposed plan is hot air and a sham. And I'll bet most Republicans in Congress think so, too.

Alvin and the Chipmunks sing for Jell-O. If you eat enough of this stuff, your voice will speed up without electronic assistance…

A right-wing website in Louisiana takes great issue with that poll I mentioned that showed a lot of Republicans down there blamed Barack Obama for the poor government response to Hurricane Katrina. They make a few good points. Asking "Who do you think was more responsible for the poor response to Hurricane Katrina: George W. Bush or Barack Obama?" is in a way, kind of a "When did you stop beating your wife?" question. The "Don't Know" response was 44% and they say those are all people who "saw through" the question and picked that option as a result.

Well, maybe some of them did. I mean, if someone asked me Stephen Colbert's oft-put question about whether George W. Bush was a great president or the greatest president, I wouldn't reply "Don't know." I would have refused to answer…but maybe some folks think "Don't Know" is a synonym for "That's a trick question." What they can't spin — and they don't even try — is that 29% that thought Obama was responsible for something that occurred years before he took office.

The funny part of it is that there is a way to spin it. It would go something like, "The 29% is indicative of Louisiana residents who are madder about what Obama hasn't done since he took office to repair damage and prepare for the next big storm." I don't believe that's true but it wouldn't be bad spin.

The response describes the pollster — Public Policy Polling — as "a left-wing outfit specializing in lots of push-polling." I haven't heard them charged with push-polling by anyone whose definition of a slanted question wasn't that the wording didn't favor Republicans. But P.P.P. is, as was admitted in the story, an outfit that works with Democratic institutions. They have also been one of the more accurate polling companies the last few years. They called the 2012 election pretty close to the way it went down and where they were off, they weren't always off in favor of the Democrat.

That said, yeah, it was kind of a trick question, especially if they didn't tally respondents who declined to answer. And it is, after all, only one poll…and one poll can always be an outlier. Still, I kinda half regret posting it since it's being interpreted to mean more than it probably does.

A lot of Louisiana Republicans blame Barack Obama for the poor government response to Hurricane Katrina.

I said here the other day, there would be people out there blaming him for the Kennedy Assassination. This isn't all that more rational.

Before the film The Great Race came out in 1965, my parents took me to a preview/tour over on the Warner Brothers lot. We got a real crummy tour of the Warner Brothers lot riding around on a little tram. The one thing I remember about the tour was that the tram passed a prop foam rubber statue of Abraham Lincoln which I instantly recognized as the one into which Eddie "Rochester" Anderson (actually, his stuntman Loren James) bounded in Mad World.

Then we were herded into a tent and shown a 10-minute preview of the forthcoming film, which looked pretty good, and after it we were turned out into an exhibit of props from the movie. They had several of its incredible cars there and they'd been gimmicked so their lights flashed and their special effects were demonstrated via automation. The cars "spoke" to us with pre-recorded voices boasting about their vital roles in the forthcoming Blake Edwards masterpiece…and being a cartoon expert, I easily recognized that all the voices of the automobiles had been done by Paul Frees. In the movie, Some Like It Hot, Frees dubbed in some of Tony Curtis's dialogue. Here, he was dubbing Tony's car.

Then I remember my parents a few weeks later taking me to see the movie at the Pantages Theater up in Hollywood. Throughout its long history, the Pantages has vacillated between showing movies and presenting stage shows, and this was during its movie years. And I really remember being utterly bored and unamused by what was on the screen. The Great Race was advertised as "The Greatest Comedy of All Time!" and was dedicated to Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy.

If you start there, you'd better be damn funny…and I didn't think it was damn or even darn funny. The sheer money that was spent — huge crowd scenes, spectacular machinery, vast scenery, etc. — also raised a bar I felt the picture didn't clear. And long? The entire movie allegedly runs 160 minutes but I'd swear we went into the Pantages on a Sunday afternoon and didn't get out 'til late Tuesday evening.

But as I change, so do a lot of my tastes. I no longer like Snickers bars and I no longer dislike The Great Race. Matter of fact, I see it now — as I did the other night thanks to TCM's Natalie Wood festival — and I think, "Why didn't I like this just for Jack Lemmon and Peter Falk?" It's also got Natalie Wood in her underwear, which is always nice to see. I sat through Penelope because it had Natalie Wood in her underwear for about nine seconds.

It's not a great comedy but it's well-made with some fine performances and I think it simply plays better on the small screen than it did at the Pantages. I especially like Mr. Lemmon playing Wile E. Coyote. I'll try to tell you the next time it's on so you can catch it…or if you can't wait, there's a DVD for six and a half bucks.

For now, I thought I'd share two oddments about the movie, one being the poster above. Every so often, you see advertising for a movie that makes it seem like the promo people said, "Okay, we've got to convince the public this is a different kind of movie than it really is!" The Great Race is a broad slapstick comedy set around the turn of the century with everyone in period costuming and Jack Lemmon — a pretty big star at the time — playing a decidedly unLemmon-ish role behind a sinister mustache.

And now here's a poster that makes him look like he did in all his earlier hits…and I don't think the photos of Tony Curtis and Natalie Wood are from The Great Race, either. Doesn't this make you think it's a sexy, contemporary comedy about a love triangle involving the three stars? This trailer for the film also starts by reminding you how much you love its leads doing what they usually do, then it proceeds to tell us about twelve too many times how funny the movie is. They wouldn't have had to do that if they hadn't cut the scenes in this trailer so as to drain most of the humor out of them…

Second oddment. There's a rousing march that's played about eighty-three times during the movie and you heard some of it if you just watched the trailer. I never stopped to really listen to it before this last viewing. You can hear it in the video below and you'll probably be faster than I was to realize what's interesting about it so I might as well tell you. I have no inside info on this but I'm betting someone said to Henry Mancini, "We want something like a patriotic march" and he said, "Okay…I'll steal about four bars from each of the five or six great American patriotic songs that weren't written by Irving Berlin and weave them all together." And I think that's how he wrote "The Great Race March." How many can you name?

Myra Adams offers the interesting (and to some, surely infuriating) theory that Democrats these days go into each presidential election with a simple advantage: A near-lock on 246 of the 270 electoral votes it takes to win.

There's some truth to that though it may be difficult to remember when you have guys on Fox News running around, building up the hopes of those who believe Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ, predicting a 325 electoral landslide for Mitt Romney. That was never in this world going to happen. Even if Romney had won, it would have been more like the margins of George W. Bush. In his two elections, let's remember, he did not get landslides like Dick Morris predicted for Mitt. Al Gore got 266 electoral votes and John Kerry got 251. The last Democrat who got less than 240 was Michael Dukakis, way back when it was possible for a Republican to win California and Pennsylvania. Nowadays, the G.O.P. doesn't even waste money buying commercial time in California.

So Democrats start with these 246 votes. Republicans don't start with a guarantee of the other 292. Second time at bat, Obama won 332 and a lot of the states beyond 246 weren't close. For example, the 246 doesn't include Virginia, which Obama won by three points or Colorado, which he won by close to five. If the 2016 Democratic nominee wins the 246 plus Virginia and Colorado, the rest of the country doesn't matter. That's over 270.

How big is the Republican "lock?" Adams doesn't suggest one but I'm going to guess 188. Romney won that many in states where he won by wide margins and he also won South Dakota's three electoral votes by two points and North Carolina's 15 electoral votes by three.

I'm not pointing this out to tweak Republicans. I think the landscape favors them in the House and they have a good position in the Senate. But they sure are acting like they know the only way they're going to have a shot at the presidency in the next decade or two is to control who gets to vote. Or to pray the Democrats nominate Anthony Weiner.

Back in this posting, I told about going up to the Improv and seeing Ellen DeGeneres, the night before she did her first Tonight Show, practice the monologue she'd do for Johnny the next evening. Here's that appearance…

By the way: I missed noting when we passed an interesting milestone in this site — the 19,000th post. This one is #19,008. I know it seems like more but I checked and only about 40% of those have been about Frank Ferrante or baby pandas.

The other day here, I showed you a 1099 form that I received from DC Comics in 1972 for $15.00, which was for my first "sale" directly to the company. I did some work for them before that but that was through Jack Kirby and he paid me.

A couple of folks out there have been trying to figure out what the fifteen bucks was for. I think I know. In '72, my friend Mark Hanerfeld was working as an assistant to DC editor Joe Orlando. DC was increasing the number of "weird" books Orlando edited. Ghost anthology titles like House of Secrets were selling decently — not great but decently and were making a profit. Much of that profit was due to the sudden and recent availability of comic artists in the Philippines. Because of the different standard of living betwixt there and here, it was possible to pay those guys a lot less (like a tenth) of what American artists were paid. The catch was that their work didn't seem to lend itself to super-hero comics and was most commercial in America on the "weird" books. Orlando suddenly had to ratchet up production on them. Put simply, he needed a lot of scripts to send off to the Philippines.

Hanerfeld suggested me as a writer and showed Joe a manuscript I'd written for another, never-published comic project. Orlando called me and asked me to submit ghost comic plots. He'd pick the ones he liked and I'd turn them into scripts and be paid DC's beginner rate, which I think was $12 a page or so. That was less than I was then getting for writing Daffy Duck and Woody Woodpecker for Gold Key Comics but it seemed like a decent starting place to do more work for DC apart from Mr. Kirby. I sent in three plots the next day and didn't hear anything for a few weeks.

Mr. Orlando finally called and said he had good news and bad news. Usually when folks say that, it means they have a lot of bad news but they've figured out some tiny silver lining they can say is good news to take the sting away from the bad news. The good news was he liked one of my plots very much. The bad news was that he'd been told by the folks figuratively upstairs that he couldn't buy any scripts from new writers for a while. The company had contracts with several writers who were guaranteed certain amounts of work. Because various projects had been axed or postponed, a couple of writers needed assignments and so Joe had to give them the work he was going to give me. What he wanted to do, he said, was to pay me $15 for the plot and then have one of his contract writers write the actual script.

I said okay. I thought it was actually a wee bit unethical — I wouldn't have written the plots on spec if I'd known that I wouldn't get the full assignment and I thought the money was low for doing the hard part — but I decided to go along with it. There was no point in alienating Joe Orlando over something like that. So the $15 was for plot of "The Death Clock," which appeared in House of Mystery #214 (June, 1973).  When I read it in the comic, I felt no connection whatsoever to it other than that my name was on the first page.  Oh, well.  That always made my father happy.

Later on, Mr. Orlando offered me a lot of work on these books and some of his others but by then I had other work that paid better or interested me more. One year on a convention panel, I was among a bunch of writers who were asked to describe the moment that we first felt like real professionals in the comic book industry. The person to my left said it was the first time he got a check from DC Comics. I said it was the first time I turned down work from DC Comics.

Today, there was a rally to support San Diego Mayor Bob Filner. A letter was read from one woman who says she has known Filner for 30 years "…and he never sexually harassed me."

I'll accept that. And I suppose O.J. Simpson has longtime friends he's never murdered.

Okay…I'm going to stop writing about this man. Goodness knows there are other embarrassing politicians in this world.

• Dick Van Dyke unhurt after being pulled from burning car. A sweep is as lucky as lucky can be…