I'm always fascinated by the way people act when they see a possibly-famous person in a public place. This afternoon, I was in a medical building in Beverly Hills, taking my mother in for some dental work. I went out for a walk as she was worked upon, got into the elevator and found myself in there with two people. One was a lady I didn't know. The other was Mel Brooks.

Actually, I don't really know Mel Brooks. I've met him about eight or nine times, never for long enough that I expected him to remember me from one time to the next. Every time I'm around Mr. Brooks, I just figure it's easier for me to be introduced to him anew.

I started to say something to him then stopped myself. He seemed preoccupied and I didn't have anything clever to say…and anyway, we were on the third floor and heading down, so there wasn't a lot of time. The lady and I got off on the ground floor while Mel continued on down to the parking level. As the elevator doors closed behind us and Mel disappeared from view, the lady — who was about forty, I'd guess — said to me, "That was someone famous, wasn't it?" The following conversation then occurred…

ME: That was Mel Brooks.

HER: Who's Mel Brooks?

ME: Did you ever hear of Blazing Saddles? Or Young Frankenstein?

HER: No. What are those? TV shows?

ME: What about The Producers?

HER: The producers of what?

ME: The Producers was one of the funniest movies ever made and it was turned into one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time. Did you ever hear of The Two Thousand Year Old Man?

The Orphan Annie eyeballs I got back from her (utterly blank) made me figure there was no point in mentioning Sid Caesar or High Anxiety or any of the other things Mel has done. So I just told the woman…

ME: Well, that's Mel Brooks.

HER: Oh. I thought he was somebody famous.

A profile of a very funny boy named Chris Elliott.

We recommend you try a bag of Popchips (or as they type it, popchips). These are low-in-fat potato crisps. They call them chips, which suggests someone slices a potato and fries the slices. I think they're really crisps, which means that someone turns potatoes into potato flour and mixes in other ingredients and then stamps out little chip shapes and cooks 'em. But even though they may try to make their product look like something it isn't, the bag I sampled the other day was pretty good.

They don't fry them like regular potato chips. They don't bake them like Baked Lays. They say they "pop" them like popcorn. I have no idea what that means but it does make them quite crunchy and tasty without a lot of fat. You get about the same calorie count as Baked Lays but I like them even better. (One drawback: They're somewhat more expensive.)

I do not own stock in the company and I do not profit in any way if you buy them. I'm just telling you about something that I tried and liked.

My TiVo has a devil of a time recording The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report since each episode plays many times and the reruns aren't all properly identified as reruns. If I just take a Season Pass for both, I get loads of repeats. Tons of 'em. There are various strategies whereby one can get a Wishlist Recording to snag all episodes except the ones whose descriptions contain certain terms that denote an unspecified rerun…but these methods don't work so well. At least, they don't work for me. Last time I tried it, it missed two Daily Shows but recorded an infomercial for Celebrity Ab Secrets.

Actually, The Daily Show isn't that big a problem. Its first telecast comes at 8 PM on my satellite dish so I set up four manual recordings — one per day for Monday through Thursday — at 8:00.

The Colbert Report first airs at 8:30 but one of my TiVos is recording Leno then and the other is capturing Letterman. It next airs here at either 10:30 or 11:30, which varies too often and also conflicts with other things I record. So I've set one TiVo to catch the 7:30 AM rebroadcast the next day.

This all works well enough except that sometimes the 7:30 AM Colbert Report broadcast is at 8:30 AM, which I think they do just to screw with me. Also, sometimes there's a Friday night episode of The Daily Show and there are often weeks (like this one) where both shows are in reruns and…well, I can still wind up with a lot of reruns or I can miss episodes if I don't do a lot of hands-on programming. Of great help is this website which lists all the talk show guest lineups and also tells what's what with Mssrs. Stewart and Colbert.

It all defeats the "set it and forget it" joy of the TiVo. Each week, I have to remember to check that all the episodes are marked for recording and I usually have to unmark at least a rerun or two due to some scheduling oddment. I'll bet Colbert could so something about this if he wanted to.

Paul Sills, who passed away last June, was to Improv Comedy what Steve Allen was to Late Night Comedy. Any time you see anything these days that even vaguely passes for "improv," it probably owes a debt, often a large one, to Mr. Sills, the founder of the legendary Story Theater and the first director of the Compass Players and Second City. (It probably also owes a considerable amount to his mother, Viola Spolin.) Sills directly or indirectly helped the careers of dozens of actors and comedians, the "direct" list including Mike Nichols, Elaine May, Ed Asner, Alan Alda, Barbara Harris and Alan Arkin.

A public memorial/remembrance of Sills will be held on Monday evening, September 22, at the El Portal Theater in North Hollywood. Details are here. Many brilliant people will be there.

No matter how bad things may seem in the news, especially with the latest economic indicators and the news from the Middle East, there are certain constants that can make you feel secure. The sun still comes up every day. Flowers still bloom in the meadows. And a new O.J. Simpson trial is in progress.

Someone named Lynn (I may stop quoting correspondents who don't have full, real-sounding names) writes…

Okay, Mark, you've pointed out several of Bill Krystal's wildly inaccurate predictions in the past. Well, this time he got one right; he predicted Sarah Palin as the v.p. pick for McCain. You can argue that even a broken clock is right twice a day, but give credit where credit is due!

I'm not sure if it was a prediction so much as a suggestion that maybe McCain picked up on…but okay, Bill Kristol (that's how he spells it) did mention Sarah Palin as a potential veep two months ago. At the time, she wasn't on too many folks' radar. But I would also point out that shortly before McCain settled on anyone, Kristol penned this column in which he made a strong case for Joe Lieberman as the best possible pick and dismissed Palin because she "has been governor for less than two years." So he kinda backed off his own prediction before it could come true.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from The New York Times that oughta raise your eyebrows well off your face…

It could become one of the most expensive financial bailouts in American history, though it will not involve any immediate taxpayer loans or investments.

The Treasury secretary, Henry M. Paulson Jr., who engineered the plan, would not say how much capital the government might eventually have to provide, or what the ultimate cost to taxpayers might be. Two months ago, the Congressional Budget Office gave a rough estimate of $25 billion. One senior government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, signaled on Sunday that even that figure was optimistic.

Mr. Paulson said Sunday that it was important to rescue the mortgage giants because a failure of either company would cause turmoil in financial markets in the United States and around the world.

This is one of the things that's wrong with our economy and it's been wrong for some time, even before the Bush administration ramped it up to disaster levels: If you or I make stupid business decisions, we suffer the consequences. But if big companies make stupid business decisions, the government steps in and bails them out with our money. And the CEOs and execs who made those decisions get to keep their six-figure salaries.

Many years ago, I attended a lecture by a man named Akio Morita, who may well have been the smartest person to ever be in the same room as me. (He was the co-founder of Sony.) He said — this is not an exact quote but it's close — "The thing that will eventually doom much of American business is that your executives pay no price for failure. You can become CEO of a corporation, do everything wrong, drive your company into the ground and then retire and buy several mansions with the money they will pay you for doing this."

Government bailouts are an even more pernicious form of this. We can't let those institutions fail…and the people who run them know it. Maybe we need to give those deregulation ideas another think, especially in cases where we have to cough up billions when companies are mismanaged.

Here we have another answering machine message that I used to have on my telephone. Earlier, I posted one with Daws Butler as Huckleberry Hound and one with Lorenzo Music as Garfield the Cat. Here's the incomparable June Foray as Rocket J. Squirrel…

It's been quite some time since I mentioned the What's My Line? reruns that air late night on GSN. They're still on and they're still fun. The episode that airs early tomorrow morning might interest someone because the Mystery Guest is Debbie Reynolds, who was then married to Eddie Fisher. Her hubby also puts in an appearance on this episode, which aired April 15, 1956.

Or you might want to check out the episode that airs early Tuesday morning. The first guest is Chester Gould, creator of the comic strip, Dick Tracy.

Then the one for Wednesday morning is a real treat. Paul Winchell is on the panel and the Mystery Guest is Edgar Bergen. It's kind of a historic meeting of the two superstar ventriloquists and their dummies.