I'm hearing from an awful lot of David Frye fans. They're directing me to this outta-date article about him, reminding me that he did a comedy CD about Bill Clinton and repeating rumors about him retiring well on a family inheritance. But so far, no one's actually seen the guy in more than ten years…which leads me to believe he hasn't performed anywhere in at least that long.

I see also that a company has taken two of his old vinyl records — I Am the President and Radio Free Nixon — and reissued them on a single CD. I Am the President was the better seller but I thought Radio Free Nixon was a funnier album.

Not much more to add but perhaps we'll hear something now that I've posted my wonderings on the 'net. Almost every time I ask a question here, I hear from someone who has an answer. Sometimes, it's immediate. Sometimes, it takes a while.

While I'm at it: Does anyone know if A. Whitney Brown is still performing? How about Ed Bluestone, a comedian who may have set some sort of record for having the most jokes stolen and quoted of anyone who had such a brief career? (Ed's the guy who described himself as a Quadrisexual, meaning "I'll do anything with anyone for a quarter." And of course, he devised the famous National Lampoon cover — "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog.")

I ask because there are some comics out there who manage to continue lucrative careers without turning up on Comedy Central every month or three. Their absence from such venues make you think they're out of the business but, for instance, Gary Mule Deer is out working somewhere every week, often opening for Johnny Mathis — another star who appears constantly but has dropped off the TV listings. Some folks may think that one of my favorite stand-ups, Kevin Meaney, has stopped performing…but he's actually been appearing for a couple of years in productions of the musical, Hairspray. (He's currently in the New York company, playing several featured roles and understudying Edna.) Maybe we need a Department of Missing Comedians.

Is it my imagination or has Tony Blair started to sound more and more like George W. Bush? Unfortunately, George W. Bush isn't sounding more like Tony Blair. He's sounding more like an impressionist doing George W. Bush.

I don't recall if I made it up or quoted it from somewhere but in an article I wrote 25 years ago, it said that by the time they leave office, all presidents look like the Paul Conrad caricature of themselves and sound like David Frye impersonating them. Bush is well ahead of schedule.

And say, whatever happened to David Frye? The last time I heard him perform was not on TV or a record or even in a club. A comedian I was writing for played me back a message the man had left on his machine. Frye was upset because the comedian had done a joke on The Merv Griffin Show that was — arguably, I thought — similar to a joke in his own act. He called, got the machine and left this long but brilliant twenty minute scolding, the first three minutes of which were in the voice of William F. Buckley, followed by four minutes of George C. Scott and then a few of Al Capp and a couple of appearances by Richard M. Nixon and so forth. (It was actually more than one message because every time he took a medium-length pause, the machine cut him off. So Ted Kennedy or whoever he'd been doing at the moment would call back and resume that particular tirade.) The recipient of the complaint was pissed at the accusation but he had to admire the skill and admit that he felt somehow honored by this long message accusing him of plagiarism.

Then a couple days later, I was out on a date in Westwood Village and I spotted Mr. Frye in the Tower Records up there, flipping through the albums in the Comedy section. He was unshaven and looked like he wanted to be alone so I didn't say anything to him.

Fifteen minutes later, my lady friend and I were walking down Westwood Boulevard and we saw an elderly woman fall on a flight of stairs that led up to a Hungry Tiger restaurant. This was back when there were Hungry Tiger restaurants. My lady friend was schooled in First Aid so she ran up and started helping the woman while I located a pay phone. This was back when there were pay phones. I called for an ambulance and then when I returned to the scene of the accident, I tried to politely shoo away some of the people who were clustered about, looking at the injured woman and asking if there was any way they could help. One of them was David Frye. He said, "Is there anything I can do?"

I think I said something like, "You can do Nixon." He laughed and gave me that furrowed brow look that all Nixon impersonators did because they'd learned it from watching Frye. I remember thinking that the beard stubble made the facial impression frighteningly accurate. Then he walked off and I've never seen him anywhere since. This was something like thirty years ago.

From about half past the Johnson administration until the fading days of Watergate, Frye was one of the most popular impressionists in the business and certainly the King in the area of political voices. Does he still perform anywhere? Is he even still alive? The guy was really remarkable.

As you may recall, everyone in my neighborhood was recently switched — against our will, I might add — from Comcast High Speed Internet to Road Runner High Speed Internet. Road Runner has done such a poor job that they keep sending out apology e-mails and, since they apparently don't trust their own assurances that everything's getting fixed, apology paper mails, as well. As well they should. A quick check of recent e-mail arrivals suggests that about half of all I receive are arriving promptly but others are dribbling in hours — in some cases, days — after they were sent.

One friend sent me an e-mail that demanded an urgent reply. When he didn't receive one in twelve hours, he sent another message. And then the next day, he sent another. All three arrived simultaneously in my inbox, six hours after he sent the third. For some reason, mail sent from America Online accounts seems to take especially long. At one point, Road Runner was marking everything that came from an AOL address as Spam but that problem seems to have ceased. The funny thing, of course, is that Road Runner and AOL are both owned, as we all will someday be, by Time-Warner.

My Internet connection also disappears about once a day for 10 or 15 minutes. Naturally, it seems to only occur when there's something I desperately need to send out immediately. This is obviously an advance on the technology that makes your printer break down only when there's fifteen minutes to get the job printed out and delivered to FedEx.

We're dealing with it all as well as we can. But there's not a whole lot we can do.

Another five and a half minutes of old cereal commercials. The best one in this batch is a Bullwinkle spot about halfway through. And look for the Sugar Smacks commercial with narration by Paul Frees. Fun stuff.

Hope you tuned in yesterday to catch a fast (where does the time go?) two-hour interview of moi by Stuart Shostak on his new Shokus Internet Radio channel. We only covered about 10% of the topics Stu wanted to get to but that was plenty. We — and by "we," I mean mostly me — discussed my childhood, my early days conning people into paying me money for writing, working with stand-up comedians and on Welcome Back, Kotter; writing variety shows for people who didn't speak English very well..and of course, the story of Jack LaLanne trying to punch me out in a trendy Hollywood eatery. I'm not one for physical brawling but I will take on most bodybuilders over the age of 85. Especially when they're a foot shorter than me.

If you didn't hear any of that, you're not outta luck. Quite the contrary, you're in luck. It reruns several times on Stuart's channel, which means you can hear it right on your computer. It airs again today and tomorrow from 4 PM to 6 PM (West Coast time) and 7 PM to 9 PM (East Coast time). Then it airs on Sunday from 10 AM to Noon (West Coast), which translates to 1 PM to 3 PM (East)…and then you can find additional air times on the schedule. To listen, go to this page and select a browser…and you don't have to just listen to me. There's a lot of fine programming to be heard 24/7 on Shokus Internet Radio.

Leaving aside time spent on a going-nowhere-fast freeway to get to the spacious Shokus Broadcasting Complex, I had a fun time. I'll be back to cover some of the other queries on Stu's list…but don't wait for me. Tune in to his station and enjoy. I'm listening right now and hearing a great Harry James record. Much better than that guy who was on yesterday for two hours talking about himself.

This is the third of at least three, maybe four plugs for my appearance this very day on Shokus Internet Radio. I'll be grilled unmercifully by your digitial deejay, Stuart Shostak, on Stu's Show, which airs live from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast and from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast. We'll talk about working on TV shows and writing comic books and cartoons and all those things I pass off as a career. I'll probably make some really embarrassing, scandalous confession like about how I got Dick Cheney's daughter pregnant or something. Maybe I'll even tell the story — and this is a real one — about how Jack LaLanne took a swing at me one night in Musso-Frank's. I lead such a colorful life.

Here's how you listen to Shokus Internet Radio. Click over to this page and select one of the audio browsers. Once you get there, you can minimize the Live365 window and use your computer to do other things — write, surf for porn, play Sudoku, whatever — while you listen. Knowing you, you'll probably do all of those while you listen. Well, you can. In fact, you can do all those things and listen to Shokus Internet Radio 24 hours a day, not just when I'm on the air. Give it a whirl. Won't cost you anything.

Six minutes more of cereal commercials. These all feature George Reeves as Clark Kent…but not as Superman. (It was decided that Clark could do commercials but not The Man of Steel.) Here we see him wandering around, walking into strange kids' homes and eating breakfast. We also hear the guy who was the voice of Tony the Tiger before Thurl Ravenscroft. Enjoy.

TV scribe Ken Levine has a very fine blog in which he discusses his experiences working on shows like Cheers and M*A*S*H. He's currently on vacation and he's turned the floor over to another TV writer, Peter Casey, who's relating his version of how the Frasier series came about. Here's the first part of his recollections and here's the second.

See that man? That's Peter Leeds, a wonderful character actor who passed away a little more than ten years ago. He was in a lot of things you saw. Matter of fact, someone told me — I can't swear this is true but it sure wouldn't surprise me if it is — that there were several years when he worked more days than any other member of the Screen Actors Guild. His listing in the Internet Movie Database has more than 170 movies and TV roles and I'd bet that's less than a tenth of them, plus it doesn't list commercials, radio shows, records and cartoon voiceovers.

Peter worked constantly…and yet, if you didn't know him by name, there's no way I could describe to you who he was. I could mention Roger C. Carmel (another character actor who worked constantly) and if you didn't know him by name, I could say, "He played the character Mudd on two episodes of Star Trek" and a lot of you would go, "Oh yeah, that guy." But for all the hundreds, even thousands of roles Peter Leeds played, he never had one that defined him that way. He played agents, cops, con men, gangsters…almost any kind of part you can imagine. But he never played anything that was so colorful and memorable that it defined him thereafter.

Mostly, he was a straight man…maybe the best of his era. Lucille Ball was always telling her producers to hire him for her shows. Bob Hope hired Peter constantly, not only to play interviewers or official-type people on his specials but he took Peter along on military tours to play opposite him in sketches. (At Peter's memorial service, a lady who'd gone on one of those tours choked up as she told a story of Peter taking charge and getting her and other performers get out of a particularly nasty situation when their troupe got too near enemy fire.) Stan Freberg used Peter on his radio show and many of his records. He was the bongo-drumming beatnik on Stan's recording of The Banana Boat Song, for instance.

And Carson loved him. People forget how many comedy sketches Johnny Carson did on The Tonight Show but he did a lot of 'em and Peter was often the serious guy in them. I often watch a syndicated show called Carson's Comedy Classics, which runs such sketches so the program has a lot of Peter Leeds. At the beginning of each show, they billboard the guest stars who appear in the segments and the other night, they ran one that gave star billing to Peter. Here's a screen grab from one that was on the other day. In one skit, Johnny played a Mafia type who was interviewing for a position in some other line of work. Peter played the man interviewing him for a job.

Sometimes, odd things make me smile and that made me smile. Peter was a working actor for well over fifty years and that's one of the few times, maybe the only time anyone gave him the same kind of billing they'd give Bob Hope or Lucy or other stars he supported. I rolled back the TiVo and froze it on Peter's name for a few seconds, just looking at it and thinking, "Look at that…Peter Leeds being treated like a star." He was a star, of course…he did great work and everyone who hired him knew that because they hired him again and again and again. But they never gave him star billing and when I saw one time they did, I thought, "That's great. I'm going to put that on the weblog." Why? Because I liked seeing it and it's my weblog. And also because I wanted there to be some page on the Internet that would tell the world how good Peter Leeds was. If you Googled his name and got this page, now you know.

Fred Kaplan doesn't think much of the report of the Iraq Study Group.

I don't know if it's a workable plan for Iraq but after watching some of the news channels today, I get the feeling that's not the point. The idea is to minimize embarrassment for all the folks who got us into the mess in Iraq. If that means keeping U.S. troops there longer and getting more killed, or making the death toll for the Iraqi people get even worse…well, that's too bad. But we have reputations to protect.

Today's click will bring you eleven minutes (that's right — eleven) of old commercials, starting with a Kool-Aid spot with the voices of Dick Beals and Paul Frees. After a Pillsbury ad, you'll see John Astin and Marty Ingels promoting their then-new comedy series, I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, an ABC promo for My Three Sons, a Barbie and Ken spot that I think is narrated by Olan Soulé, another Kool Aid Kids ad, a commercial for Mattel Spy Detector (with a v.o. by Mr. Frees again), a spot for Mattel's Vroom Bikes (announced by William Conrad) and some other stuff that I don't have time to list. Just clear eleven minutes and watch. You'll especially enjoy the commercial for Feeley Meeley.

The most encouraging thing I've seen about Robert Gates, who will presumably be our new Secretary of Defense, is this article by Fred Kaplan, who more or less likes the guy. Kaplan's been pretty good about assessing this kind of thing in the past.

Everyone says the TV show Heroes (which I have yet to watch) is a great show. It may be…but think how much better it could be if the entire cast was comprised of Deal or No Deal models.

Your bargain-hunting friend Mark wishes to inform you that the first three volumes of Looney Tunes on DVD have been drastically marked down…like to around 50% of list price. That's not quite as big a bargain as it sounds because you're never dumb enough to pay list but it is a bargain. You can now order Volume 1, Volume 2 or Volume 3 for $32.00 each and if you get them shipped by Amazon's "free super saver shipping," which arrives pretty swiftly for me, that gives you something like 180 of the best cartoons ever made (plus a ton of extras) for under a hundred bucks.

People tell me that buy.com and deepdiscountdvd.com are the two best places to get DVDs for cheap on the Internet…but buy.com still has them for $51 to $57 each and deepdiscountdvd wants $44.74 apiece or $130.61 for all three. So it pays to not assume that and to shop about. (The website shop.com has them at $81.15 per volume. Do people really not know how to browse a few stores so they don't wind up paying $81 for the same thing someone else is selling for $32?)

Anthony Lane with an interesting view of Walt Disney. "Interesting" is the kind of thing I sometimes say when I'm not sure if I agree or not.