Disney is laying off people left and right at its theme parks. Several Dwarfs have been let go and believe me, they're not Happy.

I know the economic news is not all bad but the part that is bad is bad enough to drown out the good. Still, I would like to suggest that today's dire Disney news may not be wholly the fault of the usual villains — the deregulation nuts who let Wall Street go Ponzi. Yeah, they crashed the Dow but one reason Disney revenues are down is because in times like these, people can't afford to pay Disney prices. Las Vegas is dropping its prices sharply since they figured out how tight recreational moola was becoming. Disneyland is just Vegas with mouse ears and bad food. They need to learn the same thing.

Vince Waldron sets my mind a little at ease on the Spector verdict. Deliberations were suspended this week due to an ill juror. There have also been some court holidays in there…so they've only spent one full day and two half-days arguing over Spector's culpability. I would think it could all be decided in about the time it takes to make popcorn…but at least they haven't been in there for a whole week..

If you want to get married, all you have to do is move to that hotbed of homosexual activity…Iowa.

It's worrying me that the Phil Spector jury is deliberating this long.

Greg Ehrbar alerts me to another one of those great BBC radio programs (uh, programmes) that you might want to hear. It's an hour documentary on The Ed Sullivan Show and it features, among other interviewees, Joan Rivers, Shecky Greene, Jackie Mason and the Amazing Carl Ballantine. I haven't listened to it yet but I'm not going to wait to tell you about it. It will only be online for a few more days. Thanks, Greg.

Here's a Head's Up. Saturday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running Real Life, a 1979 comedy starring Albert Brooks and directed by him. You ever see it? If not, you ought to. Brooks plays himself, a young filmmaker out to make a documentary about a typical American family, following them around and capturing their lives. PBS had actually done a TV series along these lines and that's what Brooks was spoofing. But the film is even more relevant with reference to the kind of "reality" shows we've had in recent years.

Brooks's film was not particularly successful. Possibly, its sense of humor sailed over a lot of moviegoers' skulls. Possibly, the dislikability of Albert and an uncomfy ending kept audiences away. I don't love it but I admire the hell out of it…and there are some wonderful moments, mainly in the first half hour. Charles Grodin is also quite wonderful as the head of the family whose lives are disrupted by the intrusion of Brooks and his cameras.

Catch it if you haven't seen it. Once again, it's this Saturday. It's on at 6:30 PM on my satellite dish but it may be some other time where you are. You can see the trailer over here and it's pretty funny but it has almost nothing to do with the movie.

And while you're setting your TiVo (or if you insist, VCR) for that, you might be interested in this. Early Saturday, TCM is running Zenobia, the 1939 movie that Oliver Hardy made without Stan Laurel but with Harry Langdon. Here's a little piece I wrote about this oddment. Also, Saturday evening after Real Life, they're running Best in Show, followed by This is Spinal Tap but you've seen both of those.

Two U.S. Senators are sponsoring a bill to lower and in some cases, eliminate what they call the "Death Tax." That term alone should always tip you that you're being snookered because a tax on inheritances is not a tax on death and it's also not, as they also lie, an attempt to eliminate double-taxation. Most of the income at issue here has never been taxed even once, and the super-rich have mounted this campaign to try and keep it that way.

The lies — and make no mistake about it; these are lies — include appealing to the dreams of the non-wealthy; to tell them that if they did someday inherit great wealth, as per their fantasies, the evil Death Tax would swoop in and take it all away from them, leaving them as poor as they were before…or poorer. Ergo, to protect that dream, they'd better throw their support behind the elimination of that tax. But in fact, taxes on small inheritances have already been eliminated. This is just about the Rupert Murdochs of the world trying to make certain that much of their wealth is never taxed at all.

My father was, unhappily, an Internal Revenue Agent. It was unhappy for him because he hated the job and hated what he sometimes had to do in that job. He did it because he had a family and didn't know how else to earn money…and he took some pride/comfort in that fact that he was a lot nicer to people than some of his colleagues, and that he was able to make an unfair system a bit fairer. But I'll tell you what really made him mad.

You may remember the famous line from the very wealthy, very villainous Leona Helmsley. Caught cheating on her taxes, she was quoted by an associate as saying, "We [wealthy people] don't pay taxes…little people pay taxes." That attitude enraged my father, not because he liked taxes but because he figured that every buck the Helmsleys of the world didn't pay was a buck more that their gardener had to cough up. He had cases against a lot of very, very rich people who were outraged that they had to pay any tax at all. They understood that taxes were necessary and they were all for the poor and middle class paying them. They just felt that if they were rich enough, they were privileged…and one of those privileges ought to be passing the tax burden on to others.

The current move against the "Death Tax" would make those folks and Leona very happy. Editorials today in The New York Times and The Washington Post agree…and lately, those papers don't agree on much of anything.

A few weeks ago, I succumbed to a whim and bought me one of them Magicjacks. This is a little device that you plug into the USB port of any PC that has an Internet connection of decent speed. You can then plug a telephone into your Magicjack and use it to make phone calls anywhere you like…or folks can call you on your new Magicjack phone number. I promised a review here and this is it.

How does it work? Decently. Sound quality is not quite as good as my conventional phones (which are digital) but it's quite acceptable. The first few times I used it, I had a couple of abrupt, inexplicable disconnects but that hasn't happened since.

How is it for price? Pretty good. The Magicjack device costs twenty bucks and then it's twenty bucks a year for the subscription…less if you buy multiple years at one time.

Are you going to keep using it? I don't think so. I can imagine situations where it would come in handy but they don't really apply to me. You have to have your computer on to use the Magicjack and you have to be at that computer. So if you have a home with multiple lines and/or phones in different rooms (both apply to me), you're not going to get rid of that. I suppose you could convert all your existing phones to the basic, cheapest service plan and then make all your toll and long distance calls from the Magicjack but that sounds like a lot of trouble.

Where it might come in handy is for travel: No matter where you go, you can take your phone number with you and make calls. That's assuming you get a fast Internet connection wherever you are…but again, you have to have your computer on to have the phone working. (If a call come in when your computer is off, the Magicjack system takes a voice mail message and e-mails it to you as a WAV file.)

I can imagine situations where this might come in handy. If I was commuting to an office or another city, it might be beneficial to forward all my regular incoming calls to my Magicjack number and then carry that number with me. It could also make it a lot cheaper to make calls on the road — a substantial savings if I went overseas, which I never do. But none of these scenarios applies at the moment.

The thing is probably ideal if you're living in one room with a good Internet connection and money is tight, and you might appreciate one if you travel a lot. But I'm not finding a whole lot of use for mine right now. And that's my report on the Magicjack.

I'm getting an average of one e-mail per day lately asking me when the new Garfield animated series — the one I've been working on for more than a year — will debut. Well, it has debuted. It's on France 3, which is the second largest French public television channel and it's doing so well there that we're about to start on a second season. 26 half-hours have been done and production will soon commence on 26 more. I've been writing and voice-directing. We do both of those in English.

And for some reason, I'm also listed as Supervising Producers. (Titles with "producer" in them can mean almost anything. I worked on a TV show once that had two Executive Producers. One worked a 60+ hour week, involved in every stage of production. The other did absolutely nothing on the series…and I mean nothing, apart from cashing large paychecks. I don't think he even watched the show.)

So it is on. It just isn't on in America yet. When might that happen? I have no idea. I mean, I'm sure that's going to happen but I don't know when or where. As soon as something's firm, I'll report it here.

If you've ever dreamed of a career in voiceover work, take the 13 minutes and watch this film. Not all v.o. gigs go like this but everyone who does them for a living has had sessions that went just like the one you'll see if you click. And if you do view it, stick with it all the way to the end.