If what George Packer is hearing is correct, we're about to get bombarded with arguments that the U.S. needs to be at war with Iran. And don't worry. It'll only last a few weeks, it'll pay for itself and we'll be greeted as liberators.

It's the Labor Day Weekend and we all know what that means: Jerry. For the seventy-three thousandth time, Jerry Lewis will host The Jerry Lewis MDA Telethon "live" (not really) from the South Point Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Here's a quote from the official press release…

MDA National Chairman and Telethon star Jerry Lewis, joined by anchor Ed McMahon and co-hosts, Jann Carl, Tom Bergeron, Alison Sweeney, Tony Orlando, Billy Gilman, Norm Crosby, Bob Zany and the Muppets. This year's on-air talent includes Celine Dion, Montgomery Gentry, Christopher Meloni, Mariska Hargitay, Tony Danza, Ivanka Trump, John Madden, Vanessa L. Williams, Michael Urie, Ace Young, Bear in the Big Blue House, Commodores, George Wallace, John Tesh, Lance Burton, Louie Anderson, Maureen McGovern, Ronn Lucas, the casts of Grease and Legally Blonde and much, much, more.

Thousands of business and community leaders, along with some 250,000 volunteers nationwide will appear on the Telethon or work behind the scenes of the marathon 21½-hour show.

No offense meant to any of the names above, a couple of whom are friends of mine…but why are there so few superstars listed? I remember when the telethon was Frank and Sammy and…well now, it's Bear in the Big Blue House. (And conversely, where the hell is Charlie Callas?) What we're getting this year is pretty much whoever's playing Vegas plus a few of Jerry's longtime pals…and I doubt even Celine Dion is actually showing up. They probably arranged to just tape a number or two during one of her performances at Caesars Palace.

Jerry Lewis is highly revered by just about everyone in the field of comedy. Once upon a time that wasn't so but he's survived to become one of our few Living Legends. You'd think more Big Names would turn out for the cause.

By the way: Keep in mind that not every channel on the Love Network airs the entire telecast. On my satellite dish, I can bring it in on three different channels. I can watch it via WGN in Chicago, where it starts at 8 PM Sunday night (that's Pacific time since that's where I am) and runs until 1 PM on Monday when WGN stops airing Jerry and instead shows the Chicago Cubs playing the Los Angeles Dodgers. After the game, Jerry resumes and runs until 5 PM…so that's twenty-one hours minus the three or so that the ball game will require.

I can also pick up the telethon on WNUV, which is located in Baltimore. There — and again, these are L.A. times I'm giving you — it starts at 8 PM Sunday night and ends at 3:30 PM Monday afternoon. That's nineteen and a half hours.

Those of us in Los Angeles are the lucky ones. Here, it starts on KCAL Channel 9 at 6 PM Sunday night and runs until Monday at 5 PM. That means that we get twenty-three hours of a telethon that, according to the above, runs twenty-one and a half hours. I'm assuming this is simply a matter of repeating hours. In recent years, several large chunks of the telethon have been rerun within the body of the show. Even at 21.5 hours, there are probably many repeated segments in there and I'm assuming that number is just an arbitrary one. The telethon can really be almost any length. Anyone have any idea how many hours they really do?

In 1959, the Kellogg's people decided to bring out their version of Cheerios, which was the most popular cereal from their competitor, General Mills. They added a "K" to what was basically the same thing and called it Kellogg's OK's.

Originally, the product's mascot was a burly Scotsman named Big Otis. I have no idea why they thought kids would spark to the character and I'm guessing that someone at Kellogg's was afraid they'd made a bad call on that one. Almost immediately, Yogi Bear became co-spokesperson for OK's and before long, Otis was off the box and the bear was in his place. I'm also guessing that Kellogg's had their highest hopes for this cereal and that as they assigned other Hanna-Barbera characters to appear on cereal boxes and in commercial, they saved H-B's most popular star, Yogi, for the most important assignment.

Yogi may have been smarter than the average bear but he wasn't much good at selling cereal. In the early sixties, Kellogg's decided to give up and discontinue OK's. Their product development team was asked to come up with a new product that could use the same manufacturing equipment…and that's how Froot Loops were born.

This is a commercial that I recall as the one that introduced OK's, at least in the Los Angeles area. Since Yogi liked it, I immediately asked my parents to get a box, which they did. I liked it but I liked Cheerios more. Apparently, I wasn't the only kid who made this decision.

Timothy Noah reviews the O.J. Simpson If I Did It book…which I guess has now been retitled, If I Did It. It's a two-part review. Here's part one and here's part two. I agree with what Noah says about the text revealing Simpson as a very sick man with great anger towards his murdered spouse. I don't agree that the new character who's been introduced into the scenario — a friend named "Charlie" who helped Simpson commit the murders — is real.

I recently purchased one of these. It's the Sony DVPCX995V 400-Disc DVD Mega Changer/Player — a carousel that holds 400 DVDs. I have it in my office, all loaded with about 250 of my favorite movies and another 150 or so DVDs from my stack of ones I've had sitting here and never gotten around to watching. The machine is a bit slow and clunky but it does work. My plan is to keep taking out movies I will probably never re-watch and insert better films…to the point where I eventually have it all or mostly filled with fave flicks.

Here's one silly little problem I have. As you may know, a DVD of a movie sometimes has the name of the film encoded into it. Some players will read and display this encoded name, and my DVPCX995V builds a whole TiVo-like menu of them. I push a button on the remote and get a screen I can scroll through of all the movies in my player and then select the one I want to watch. In many cases — most, actually — there's no title encoded so I have to enter it manually. That's okay. My problem is that frequently, when there is a movie title encoded, I want to change it on the screen…and the Sony player won't let me. I have to live with their encoded name on my menu.

In some cases, it's not all that coherent. The name encoded on A Fish Called Wanda is "fisch_wanda." So that's what pops up on my menu and I can't change it. On Dr. No, the encoded title is blank…so a blank title appears on my menu and I can't change it. There are several encoded titles that misspell the name of the movie. Anyone have an idea how I can change this? Or how I can recode the DVDs to strip out that disc info? I have a hunch I'm outta luck on this.

Other than that, it seems like a great little machine. If you're thinking of getting one, wait a few weeks. I'll play with the one I got and let you know if I change my mind about it.

Isn't it interesting how everyone in the country except Larry Craig knew that he'd have to resign?

Time for a clip from some Milton Berle program or another. This one's four minutes and you can ignore the first minute or so, which is kinda lame. But then Arnold Stang enters. We love Arnold Stang. He was a great cartoon voice actor. He was Top Cat and Herman the Mouse and many others. He was a great character actor. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And he's still with us. (I had the honor of directing him once on a cartoon show and he still sends me a Christmas card every year.) So let's watch Arnold.

Radio Master Paul Harris did a great interview yesterday with Noel Blanc, son of Mel. Meanwhile, Stu Shostak has a great interview up this week with Bill Marx, son of Harpo.

So you have your choice. You can listen to the son of the Man of a Thousand Voices or the son of the Man with None.

Matt Taibbi has written a long article about how military contractors are raking it in because of the Iraq War. Just in case you need something else to make you angry about this whole mess.

According to this story, Tribune Studios — more commonly known as "The KTLA lot" — is on the auction block. This is the former movie studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, bordered by Van Ness and Bronson. It was originally built by Warner Brothers in 1919 and they made most of their early pictures there, including The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio, the birthplace of Bugs Bunny and his amigos, was on that lot.

After Warners built a bigger lot in Burbank, the Hollywood lot was sold to Paramount, which housed its local TV station (KTLA, Channel 5) there and used some of the soundstages for filmed TV shows. (Gunsmoke shot there for a time.) Gene Autry purchased KTLA and the lot in 1964 and thereafter, it was a studio that housed a TV station but primarily rented space to other producers. I wrote a lot of shows for Sid and Marty Krofft that taped there. The first season of WKRP in Cincinnati was taped there. Dinah Shore did her talk show there. Hundreds of game shows taped there. Solid Gold taped there. Donny and Marie taped there. And so on. In 1985, Tribune Entertainment bought KTLA and a few years later, they bought the studio, too.

Someone in the above-linked article predicts that the new buyer, whoever it is, will upgrade the property and keep it functioning as a TV production facility. I'll be delightfully surprised if this happens but it feels like another of those "mixed-use" developments with some production facilities but also condos and retail outlets. In terms of history, I'd like to see it remain a big TV studio but geographically, it's probably more suited nowadays for a big mall anchored by a business not unlike Walmart. KTTV/Metromedia, which had a similar history and which used to be across the street, is no longer across the street. There's a new school building going up on that property…but the point is that the owners of that facility didn't try to keep TV production going there. I have no idea who'll buy KTLA but I'd bet they won't, either.

There's no shortage on the web today of articles and weblog postings about the stupidity, hypocrisy and general sickness of Larry Craig. But this piece by William Saletan makes a simple, pungent point. It's that Craig has been a fierce supporter of military policies that would cause a soldier to be kicked out of the service for doing what Craig admitted to doing. One hopes that people will realize that it's not just Craig who's in the wrong on this. It's the policy.

Tonight, Charlie Rose spends the full hour chatting with Don Rickles.

By the way: Not only are dozens of full episodes of The Charlie Rose Show now available on YouTube and Google Video but there are many excerpts that are viewable over at the Charlie Rose Show website. So if you like the way the man interviews — and I do — there's plenty on the 'net to enjoy…and the shows usually work as pure audio. So I can start one running, minimize the window on my computer, and then listen to it as I work. Very nice.

The opening to The Yogi Bear Show in Polish. At least, I think it's Polish.

Someone wrote me recently to ask how come I keep linking to Fred Kaplan's articles about Iraq. I wrote back that I link to them because they strike me as extremely accurate, informative and — most of all — realistic. In this latest piece, Kaplan deals with a simple fact that a lot of the arguments about Iraq overlook; that the U.S. will be lessening its presence in Iraq because we are running out of troops to send. An amazing percentage of articles I've read seem to treat that as one of those little details that we can just ignore if we really need to have more soldiers there.

If you've been toying with buying a TiVo, I'll suggest a deal you might consider…and I don't make a nickel on this. The best company I've found that handles TiVos, especially for repair and upgrades, is a firm called (for some reason) WeaKnees. They've come up with a stash of refurbished Humax TiVos with built-in DVD burners. This is the only TiVo system out there for which one can still purchase TiVo Lifetime Service, which at $299 is a bargain if you're going to keep the machine more than two years.

WeaKnees is offering the Humax TiVo for $199 with free shipping. There's a $150 rebate available so the machine costs you $49. Actually, if you go for this deal, spend a hundred bucks more and get the version in which WeaKnees installs a larger harddisk, thereby boosting your recording capacity from 40 hours to 350.

It won't handle hi-def but if that doesn't matter to you, you can get a TiVo with lifetime service and a DVD burner for a grand total of $348-$448. And yes, it's refurbished but you'd be buying it from a pretty reliable company. Here are the details.

A couple times a month, I get an e-mail asking me if I think TiVo will be around long enough to make it safe to invest in one. Yeah, I do. A few years ago, there was a period when that seemed iffy…but even there, if you'd bought a machine then and it all blew up today, you'd have gotten your bucks' worth out of it. At the moment, TiVo looks somewhat stable. The big threat is probably not that the company would go under but just that someone else will come out with a machine you'd rather have. (The odds are it would be the TiVo company and given their past behavior, there's a good chance — though no guarantee — that they'd allow you to transfer that lifetime service contract to the upgraded machine.)

A newer, better model is pretty much the risk when you buy any piece of technology today. A week or so ago, I purchased the new Blackberry Curve cellphone and on my way out of the store (italics, mine) I heard another salesguy talking about a new phone that'll be out in a few weeks that sounds even better. And if I waited for that and bought it instead, on my way out of the store, I'd hear of yet another coming out in a few weeks. Still, I've been a TiVo customer since the first few months they were on the market. That was mid-1999 and I haven't seen another brand of digital video recorder I thought was preferable. It'll happen but it hasn't happened yet.