Apparently, theories are already starting to pop up on Ye Olde Internet that Richard Jeni didn't commit suicide and was the victim of, as they say, foul play. "Foul play" is one of my favorite euphemisms for murder. It makes it sound like someone violated the Infield Fly Rule.

Two different e-mailers wanted to know if I was suggesting that when I said there was no sign that the guy might kill himself. No, I was not. I don't know anything more about it than was in the Associated Press report to which I linked. As near as I can tell, none of the speculators have any reason at all to speculate, either…which doesn't mean this might not blossom into a great tabloid news story. I mean, Anna Nicole is kind of winding down and Britney Spears has run her course. Nancy Grace and others on cable would probably love to find even the remotest justification to introduce the "m" word into this matter. Remember: You don't need to believe there's anything to a scandal in order to cover it in the news these days. You just need to be able to say "someone" thinks something might have happened.

As a quick change of partial subject, I wanted to repeat one of the funniest things I ever heard Richard Jeni say. I mentioned it back here but to save you clicking, I'll just reprint it…

A few years ago, I was in Las Vegas and I happened to catch him doing an interview on a local show there. He was talking about his appearance in the then-upcoming motion picture, Burn, Hollywood, Burn, and he said approximately the following…

Did you ever see the movie, The Player? This is the exact same movie but without the quality. This is for the discriminating filmgoer who's been wondering, "What if The Player hadn't been a very good movie?"

I thought it was the funniest, most honest thing I'd ever heard anyone say in "plugging" an upcoming film.

Boy, I don't get this one at all. They're saying stand-up comic Richard Jeni committed suicide yesterday morning. There was no apparent reason, no apparent warning sign…nothing.

He was a very funny boy. Back here, I highly recommended his latest (and I guess now, last) HBO Special. I'd still recommend just about anything he did, though it may be a little harder to laugh at it after this. He was a very simple, straightforward comedian whose act seemed derivative of no one else. It came from nothing but his own sense of humor. On stage, he projected the image of a guy who really had a sane, common sense attitude towards the world. Which I guess is one of the things that makes it hard to accept that he did what they say he did.

Last week was the 25th anniversary of the death of John Belushi, who committed his own kind of suicide with drugs and the way he lived. I thought about posting something here but didn't get around to it. If I had, it would have been about how (to me) the most tragic part of Belushi's passing was that everyone knew in advance how it would end. In fact, it wasn't necessary to even announce the cause. When it first hit the news wires, they just said that John Belushi had been found dead and everyone just kind of shrugged and assumed, "Drug overdose." Some people thought they heard the TV and radio news reports give the cause of death hours before they actually did. It was that expected.

People talking about Jeni's death are probably going to mention Belushi and also Freddie Prinze. I knew Freddie a little bit, though not well. At the time he shot himself, I was working for the outfit that produced his show, Chico and the Man, and while I don't think anyone there expected the guy to take his own life, no one seemed all that stunned that something dark and tragic occurred. The warning signs were there.

And then you have something like this. I never met Richard Jeni. I'm not sure I ever even saw him perform live, though I know that recently, when I saw he was playing the Improv in Hollywood or the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach, I thought, "Hey, maybe I'll get a group together and we'll go see him." (Let that be a lesson to me about putting things off 'til the next time.) Maybe there was a dark side that never showed itself on stage. Maybe those who knew him well aren't stunned at the news, I dunno. It's just a kick in the gut for some of us.

Elayne Boozler remembers the guy. I know I will.

In case you didn't hear, Premiere magazine is shutting down. And so, after only three issues, is the new Cracked.

George S. Kaufman reportedly once said that if you wanted to get even with someone who did you wrong, you should convince them to invest heavily in new productions of Ibsen plays. I think I'll tell everyone I don't like that it's a dandy time to start a new magazine.

Robert Kagan writes that the "surge" in Iraq has been a great success, while Glenn Greenwald reminds us how Robert Kagan has been wrong about Iraq, every step of the way.

Here's another one of those cartoons I wrote that shouldn't be on YouTube but the lawyers haven't gotten around to ordering its removal. This is "Picnic Panic," which was a fifth season episode and one of the occasional all-music cartoons we did. Lorenzo Music performed the voice of Garfield and Thom Huge did the voice of Garfield's long-suffering owner, Jon. Thom also did the picnicker at the end. I wrote the lyrics and a very gifted musician named Ed Bogas wrote the tune, did the musical score (that's mostly him you hear playing) and sang for the ants. This cartoon is full of singing ants…

My buddy Jerry Beck got together a bunch of vintage Cocoa Puffs commercials that feature the voice of the great Chuck McCann. He does both Gramps and the Cocoa Puffs bird in these spots you can view over at Cartoon Brew.

Lately, there seem to be a lot of what one might call "Something to outrage everyone" news stories — cases where we could disagree on what's happening but either interpretation is cause for anger. The case of Jose Padilla, the alleged terrorist, is one of those.

Either this guy's innocent or guilty. If he's innocent, then your government has held an innocent man prisoner for three and a half years, doing everything possible to not let him have his day in court or proper legal counsel. They've also either tortured him intentionally or just by keeping him confined the way they have, done severe damage to his physical and mental health.

Or maybe he's guilty. If that's so, then the outrage is that your government has botched his prosecution beyond belief. Many of the charges against him have been dropped or dismissed. The rest may get tossed because of his condition or because the prosecutors keep amending their account of the facts of the case or, most recently, because they seem to have "lost" the videotape of his last interrogation.

I don't know which it is. But something really stinks about this whole affair.

As we mentioned back here, this weblog has only three missions in life. They're not about stopping Global Warming or the War in Iraq or any of those unimportant, easy crusades. Anyone can do stuff like that. No, we tackle the vital issues of the day which are, of course…

1. Get the Souplantation to add their Creamy Tomato Soup to their regular line-up.
2. Get the Cadbury Adams Gum Company to bring back Adams Sour Orange Gum.
3. Get Skidoo released on DVD.

So far, we've had limited success with #1. The Creamy Tomato Soup is back at Souplantation but only for the month of March. (We trust you're websurfing via wireless connection from some Souplantation while eating this scrumptious Creamy Tomato Soup. That's where I'm posting from until April Fool's Day. I'm at one right this minute, happily regaining much of the weight I've lost in the last nine months.)

There's been no movement on #2 so we've decided to focus our energies on #3: A legal, Kosher release of easily the oddest motion picture ever to be directed by an Oscar-nominated (though not for this) director and released by a major motion picture studio. You want to know how strange this movie is? The three minute chunk you'll see in today's video link, which is from the opening of the film, is the most coherent part.

I am told that Paramount Home Video, which I once urged here to show some moxie and put this thing out on DVD, is powerless to act; that the estate of director Otto Preminger controls the 1968 film and won't let it out. I think they're making a big mistake. If you try and suppress Skidoo, three things will happen. One is that it'll still be around but the bootleggers will make the money instead of the estate. Secondly, the movie will be seen only via crummy prints that will harm its reputation. And lastly and most significantly, people will think of this movie as something that Otto must have been ashamed of and will therefore view it the wrong frame of mind.

It only works if you presume that Mr. Preminger — a skilled filmmaker, as he proved so many times in his career — knew exactly what he was doing and made exactly the film he intended to make, and that his intention all along was to create something no sentient human being could ever understand. The very same year, Stanley Kubrick tried to achieve the same goal in 2001, but he failed by not casting Groucho Marx as God or Jackie Gleason as a mobster who trips out on LSD.

Here's three minutes of Skidoo with Gleason, Carol Channing and Arnold Stang. While you watch it, I'm going back to get more of the Creamy Tomato Soup and maybe another slice of the Garlic Asiago Focaccia. Come to think of it, I believe there's an actress in this movie named Garlic Asiago Focaccia…

Jonathan Chait on two sad things. One is that John McCain seems willing to sell out an awful lot of his principles to try and get the Republican nomination for '08. The other sad thing is that he's doing it even though it doesn't seem to be working.

This year's Academy Awards, like most recent ceremonies, struck me as conspicuously devoid of star power, above and beyond the folks who were there because they might be receiving an Oscar. And the ones who were there for other reasons were seen over and over and over. It might have been a small but thrilling moment to have Jack Nicholson come out to present Best Picture but by that point in the telecast, we'd seen Nicholson eighty times in audience cutaway shots and Ellen DeGeneres had acknowledged him from the stage once or twice. So it was like, "Nicholson? Big deal."

I asked here who there is around who might have been a big deal as an Oscar presenter and I asked it in two categories. Who would have been exciting to see who represented "Old Hollywood?" And who of our current pantheon of stars would have given you a tingle if they'd suddenly been announced? Here are some of the names I received in the first category…

Jean-Paul Belmondo, Sidney Poitier, Brigitte Bardot, Karl Malden, Shirley Temple, Ricardo Montalban, Tony Martin, Sophia Loren, Olivia DeHavilland, Cyd Charisse, Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Russell, Celeste Holm, Kirk Douglas, Joan Fontaine, Deborah Kerr, Richard Widmark, Paul Scofield, Kathryn Grayson, Jerry Lewis, Betty Hutton, Lena Horne, Deanna Durbin and Van Johnson

The two most often-mentioned names were Doris Day and Mickey Rooney. Based on my admittedly-limited encounters with both, I would guess the following: That if you went to Doris Day and said, "Either you appear in front of a live audience or every man, woman and child in the state of Ohio will die," she would shrug and say, "Goodbye, Columbus." And if you put Mickey Rooney up there, he'd still be talking about the days when he was the biggest box office star in the world and you could go into the MGM Commissary and see the lovely Miss Judy Garland order a chicken salad sandwich.

A number of you also mentioned Charles Lane. I think it would be better if we waited until he got a little older.

Many of the suggestions were for interesting teams…like Sean Connery, Roger Moore, George Lazenby, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig all presenting an award together. Of course, that would mean taking Lazenby away from his job as a seat filler.

Other teams put forth: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke. Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman. Robert Redford and Paul Newman. Almost anyone and Paul Newman. Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Jonathan Winters and Robin Williams.

In the category of Newer Hollywood, I got very few responses, mostly duos from hit movies — Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, Mike Myers and Dana Carvey, Mark Hamill and Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, the cast of Ocean's 13, etc. I suspect the Oscars may already be doing as well as they can in this area.

A couple of people asked what I thought would happen if the surprise presenter in the Best Director category was Roman Polanski. I think it would depend on whether he was brought on in handcuffs…but the response would have been interesting. Would people hesitate to applaud a man convicted of statutory rape? Or would they have figured that if it's okay for him to win that Oscar, it's okay for him to present it? I dunno. What I think would have upset many is if he'd "appeared" via satellite link the way he testified in that libel suit he brought against the magazine, Vanity Fair.

Thanks to all of you who sent in suggestions, even the joke ones like Tony Clifton, Ron Jeremy and me. My favorite suggestion, by the way, was from the person who wanted to see Shirley Jones and Marty Ingels present an Oscar. I think that would have been wonderful. Imagine that moment when they announce Marty Ingels and every single person in the Kodak Theater gets up and walks out.

Let's take a minute and watch Bucky Beaver sell Ipana toothpaste. Most of these ads were produced by a special division that Mr. Disney had in his studio during the fifties. It produced commercials, many of them with animation and graphics that did not fit the established Disney look or quality of movement. A gentleman named Charles A. Nichols — everyone called him "Nick" — was the main director there, having earlier distinguished himself as the director of some of the better Pluto cartoons. Like many animation folks of his generation, Nick closed out his career working on Saturday morning cartoons for Hanna-Barbera. (He also directed for Ruby-Spears. Remember that story I told here recently about one of the first cartoons I wrote and how its voice director was rude to actress Janet Waldo? Well, Nick was the animation director of that particular cartoon. Had he also directed the voices, he would have been much nicer to Janet.)

Another animation vet who worked for a time for H-B was Tex Avery. In fact, Tex and I briefly shared an office at the studio. Once, I eavesdropped as he and Nick got into a friendly argument about Disney's commercial division. I wish I could recall it in better detail but basically, Tex was needling Nick, telling him that that was where Walt stuck artists because they weren't good enough to work on Sleeping Beauty or because they were in need of a good spanking…or both. Nick knew Tex was ribbing him but he still repeated, over and over, that the commercial crew was full of talented people and that it was encouraged to be more experimental. With television becoming an increasingly important marketplace, Walt wanted to see if his people could do limited, lower budget work that would be acceptable as Disney animation. (The premise, I guess, was that the commercials didn't count as Disney animation since they were commercials and since most people didn't know what studio had done them.)

Tex had nothing against doing commercials. He'd done an awful lot of them, himself, including the Raid spots like the one I posted here not long ago. He was just having fun kidding Nick and imitating an imaginary Walt Disney bellowing, "We can't put Nichols on the important stuff. Put him in the garage where we make commercials for bran flakes!" Later, when Tex wasn't around, Nick admitted to me that there was a little truth to the joke; that Walt did stick some people in that department to keep them away from the work he cared about. I'm pretty confident Nick was not one of them.

Anyway, that's what came to mind when I came across this clip you're about to watch. The announcer you'll hear at the beginning is Jimmy Dodd, who was the adult host of The Mickey Mouse Club. And the voice of Bucky Beaver is Jimmy Dodd sped up a little. Here's Bucky trying to get us to brusha brusha brusha with the new Ipana…

The last few years, I've seen a lot of things that have lowered my opinion of reporters in this country. Obviously, I don't mean every reporter but taking them as a homogenous group, it's amazing how they will try to gin up a "hot story" out of darn near nothing…and get the basic facts wrong, to boot.

And I can't think of anything that proves this better than the fact that so many papers, magazines and websites think it fits any known definition of "news" that Captain America has been killed in his comic's current storyline.

The best argument against moving up the start of Daylight Saving Time, as Congress did, is that it's confusing our TiVos. Here's a page that explains this in a way that will probably confuse you. Bottom line: You don't have to do anything. Here and there, the time displayed on your screen may be wrong but you won't miss American Idol.

A writer friend of mine, Marc Scott Zicree, takes us on a tour of three of his favorite places to eat in Los Angeles. But that's not why I'm linking to this video, no sir. I'm linking to it because they happen to be three of my favorite places to eat in Los Angeles…

This afternoon, I had to drive something to the post office. Which would have been no big deal except that when I went out to my garage, I found that the battery in my car was dead. Some idiot (i.e., me) hadn't fully closed the right rear door on the passenger's side when he (i.e., me) last drove the car, which was Tuesday afternoon. The dome light had been on for over 48 hours and that had run down the battery.

Actually, it still wasn't a big deal. I called Triple-A and a man was there in fifteen minutes to give me a jump and send me on my way, just in time to not get to the post office before it closed. But I got to thinking…

Obviously, I need to be more careful about this in the future, especially since this is probably the third or fourth time I've done this in my life. (In my defense: Once, it wasn't me, it was my assistant when she took the car to be washed. And once, it was because I closed the car door on a seat belt that was hanging out.) But I'm curious why this is even a problem at all with cars…or is it just with some cars?

Almost everything I own that "charges" has some sort of battery meter, often with a little warning buzzer if it gets too low. Why doesn't my car have a little meter that stops the battery from being drained if it's about to get too low to start the car? Do some cars have that? It would seem like a feature that could be installed for around five bucks, which means they could make it a $300 option and we'd all pay.

Here's an idea that I thought of once while waiting for the Auto Club in this situation. A car should have two batteries. One, which we'll call Battery A, works just like your standard car battery: As you drive, it charges and it's what starts the engine in the morning. But you'd also have Battery B, which is a smaller battery, just big enough to start the car twice. It gets charged the same way but it doesn't power anything on its own. It just holds a charge, waiting until it's needed.

When the moment comes that Battery A is dead — say, because you stupidly didn't close the right rear door on the passenger's side two days earlier — you flip a switch. Or maybe there could be an automatic connection…but either way, Battery B goes online in the car and it starts the engine. Then once Battery A is charging again, Battery B goes offline or you take it offline…and later, it recharges so it's ready the next time you need it.

Why don't they have this? Or do they have it? What am I missing here? (Even though I used to sometimes fix my old '57 T-Bird myself, I'm not too savvy about cars. When I had to look at the engine, I used to try peeking through the ignition keyhole.)

Yes, I know there are little packs of drycell batteries one can buy that will jumpstart your car. There are cables that will connect you to an AC outlet via your cigarette lighter. I even have a little portable powerpack that I could have used to jump the battery if I'd remembered to recharge it in the last year or two. I'm wondering why no one just builds something like that into vehicles. They're putting DVD players into back seats now. Couldn't there be an extra battery in the trunk somewhere? Or at least a little gauge that stops the main one from draining to the point where it's useless?