Ellen Gray: Comic-Con dispenses lots of knowledge

SAN DIEGO - Everything I know I learned at Comic-Con 2009, including:

* The cow on Fox's "Fringe" has been recast. Again.

"This is going to be our third cow, in Vancouver [where the show is moving after being shot last season in New York]," reports the irrepressible Jasika Nicole, who plays curly-topped lab rat Astrid Farnsworth on the sci-fi show.

"I loved Cow No. 2," Nicole told a small group of reporters last week. "She had stage presence, she had charisma. She had the most brilliant comic timing you could imagine. Like she would moo at the perfect time, every single time." (Cow No. 1 only worked on the pilot, which was shot in Toronto.)

As for Cow No. 3, "I don't know about her. She's new, I think she's a rookie, she hasn't done it for a long time. And I swear, she's really skinny, she's the biggest cow we've had, and you can see her bones and her ribs, because she just got done nursing her calf," Nicole said.

"She's like a model cow."

As for Astrid, Nicole would like to see her spend more time with the human actors.

"I did have a brief talk with a couple of the writers and producers and they said that she was going to get out of the lab and that she was going to be very active in some sort of way, not involving the cow, so there's a lot of opportunities for her. And they think the whole idea of their being a parallel universe kind of opens a lot of doors, you know, no matter what.

"I mean, what is Astrid like in this other universe? Maybe she has straight hair."

* I'm not the only one who thinks Syfy's rebranding is the equivalent of the new Coke.

Just hours after overhearing a pedestrian outside the San Diego Convention Center comment, as someone walked by with a bag emblazoned with the new name of The Channel Formerly Known as Sci Fi, "I hate that they changed the spelling of Sci Fi. It's dumb," I was there to hear actor Eric McCormack mock the new name, suggesting it looks like "see fee."

After fans shouted out answers to his rhetorical question about the change, the "Will & Grace" star, here to promote the DVD and Blu-ray release of "Alien Trespass," quipped that apparently, "official answer is [the channel's] stupid."

* Comic-Con turns even stars into fanboys.

McCormack, who was making his first appearance at the four-day convention, said he'd stood in line Saturday for the autographs of the actors who voice the characters on "SpongeBob SquarePants."

* The end of the world doesn't have to be a downer.

Attending a panel for the CW's "Supernatural" - a show I confess I haven't watched since its first season - I learned that the apocalypse is at hand in the upcoming Season 5. There's apparently even going to be a flash-forward episode that takes place five years post-apocalypse.

Responding to suggestions that the show's fourth season might have been a little dark as it was, "Supernatural" writer Sera Gamble tried to be reassuring.

"The apocalypse is surprisingly amusing, I think," said the writer, shortly before a handbasket arrived to transport her to hell.

* Cow No. 3 notwithstanding, not everyone objects to working with livestock.

Here's how Michelle Forbes explains how she ended up playing the mysterious Maryann in HBO's "True Blood": "When someone offers you an entrance where you are standing naked with a pig, you don't say no."

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