Heather MacDonald considers the moral dilemma of the Conservative who is atheist or agnostic. I don't have a strong opinion on any of this — at least not yet — but I thought the article provided some interesting topics to ponder. So here's a link to it.

No newspaper has reported it yet — and even the film blogosphere found out months after it happened — but a prominent "b-movie" star of the seventies, Candice Rialson, passed away four months ago. The cause was liver disease according to her husband, as quoted in one of several movie blogs that have scrambled to obtain details. Their common goal at the moment seems to be to make enough fuss to prompt obits in the mainstream media…and I've decided to join the cause.

Between around 1974 and 1979, Candice appeared — starring, usually — in a number of low-budget movies of the Roger Corman variety…some of them, like Hollywood Boulevard and Candy Stripe Nurses, even for Roger Corman. She briefly showed promise of making the uneasy transition to upscale film and television work but somehow, it never happened and she was retired from acting (at age 27) by 1979. I shouldn't say "somehow" because at least one reason was obvious: Too many sleazy credits for the casting folks at the major studios. She certainly had the looks and she probably had the talent…but she also had Chatterbox on her résumé. (Chatterbox was kind of like The Vagina Monologues, only literally.)

I don't think it would matter today. In fact, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't. But it mattered back then.

At least it did to CBS the time I had her called in to audition for a show there. I had seen her in the aforementioned Hollywood Boulevard, which — unlike most of her other credits — was a delightful, funny feature with much to offer beyond the visual of Ms. Rialson with her shirt off. Shot on a budget that on a film shoot today wouldn't cover the donut bill from Craft Services, it was cleverly written (by Danny Opatoshu) and hastily but brilliantly directed (by Joe Dante and Allan Arkush). And it also had some splendid performances by Dick Miller, Paul Bartel and Candice. So a week or two after I first saw it, when my producer said, "Can't you think of some really beautiful women who can do comedy?," I thought of Candice and we brought her in.

She read so well that the casting director immediately called her back for several other projects he was working on. But she didn't get them and she didn't get my show…and like I said, the other credits were a contributing factor. A few months later, I met her at a party and she asked me why we'd hired someone other than her. I tried to be diplomatic but she knew just what the problem was…and even added, "Wait'll they see what I've got coming out in a few months." Ten or twelve years later, a prominent director tracked her down and, based wholly on his love of Hollywood Boulevard, offered her a fully-clad part in a major motion picture. What he got back was along the lines of, "Thanks, but I'm out of the business now."

If you'd like to know more about Candice, this website is all over the story and so is this one and this one and even this one. And who knows? Maybe the L.A. Times and Variety and Hollywood Reporter will all notice, too.

Ol' pal Paul Harris, who's heard Monday through Friday on KMOX radio in St. Louis, has dug a great interview out of his archive. It's a chat he had with talk show legend Mike Douglas in late 2000. Go listen to it — especially the part where Mr. Douglas talks about having Malcolm X on his show…and being afraid to admit that he agreed with much of what Malcolm X had to say.

My TiVo's forever doing me favors. Why, just the other day — completely on its own and without me doing any kind of programming — it recorded A Big Steaming Pile of Me, which is an HBO standup special that Richard Jeni did last January.

How I missed it in the first place, I have no idea…because Jeni has long been one of my favorite comedians, especially after the remark I quoted in this item. The guy's very funny and very clever and unlike many good comics working these days, his material is in no way derivative of eight dozen other guys mining the same areas. I'm not sure why his name isn't mentioned more often when people tick off the names of the hottest comedians out there.

That special is so good, I just ordered the DVD from Amazon…which you can do by clicking here. I've also begun checking this page on Mr. Jeni's website to see when he's going to be performing within an easy commute of my area. (I just missed a couple nights he did at a club to which I could have walked. We won't be making that mistake again.)

And if you're too cautious/cheap to spring for the DVD, HBO2 is running the special at least once more — August 21, at a time when most of us are asleep. I'll remind you as we get closer to the date just in case your TiVo doesn't do you any favors.

Allan Sherman performs "The Painless Dentist Song," a lovely parody of the tune, "The Continental." Whenever I hear the latter now, I think of the lyrics of the former. Mr. Sherman did that to any number of songs for me.

Electricity was out in my neighborhood all evening. That happens, and the D.W.P. does a good job of correcting these problems and getting the juice flowing through the lines again. But here's the part I find a bit annoying…

You phone up to make sure someone has reported the outage or to see if they have an estimated restoration time…and you wait on hold for a human being to come on the line. While you wait, you have to listen to the same recorded announcement over and over…

…and it keeps telling you that they're experiencing a high caller volume and you'd be better off checking the Department of Water and Power website, instead. Which is tough for some of us to do when the power's out.

On the web, you can find a bunch of reports on this year's Comic-Con International but you won't find any better than Peter Sanderson's. He's serializing his accounts over at Quick Stop Entertainment. Here's a link to Part One, which you should read but you can skip if you're short on time since it doesn't mention me. Here's a link to Part Two, which does so you have to read it. I'll be linking to future parts as they appear, especially if they mention me.

Image Entertainment is announcing a new DVD that will present the entirety of the three episodes of The Ed Sullivan Show on which Elvis Presley made his legendary appearances.

Well, not exactly.

I'm not sure if this will be mentioned on the DVD or not but there were a couple of non-Elvis segments on those episodes where there were legal clearance problems. They're not historically significant so they're being replaced on these DVDs with segments from other Sullivan programs. If you watch carefully, you may note Ed's wardrobe changing suddenly as he introduces them. The Will Jordan monologue on the January 6, 1957 episode is one of them. Will wasn't on that program but his spot has been edited in to replace one that couldn't be included.

These should be great DVDs for two reasons. One is that they're including all the other material for those of us who don't care all that much about Elvis. There's a spot with Carl "The Amazing" Ballantine. There's one with Señor Wences. There's Carol Burnett and Charles Laughton and a great musical number from the Broadway show, The Most Happy Fella. For those who don't care about such performances, the DVD producers are including a menu option to play only the Elvis songs. I wouldn't mind another option that said, "Play everything except Elvis."

The other selling point is that I've seen a preview of the video quality and it's incredible. The photo above left is not from the DVD. The video on the DVD has been processed by a new restoration process called Live Feed that makes it look like…well, like a live feed. It looks like Elvis is performing today, there's a black-and-white video camera on him and you're next door, watching him on a monitor. I'll try to post something about this amazing technique in the next week or two. It's salvaging old kinescopes and making them highly watchable today. After you see it, you'll want to join me in encouraging more companies to employ it. The video quality on some recent releases is disgraceful or, at least, not as fine as it could have been.

You can see the full listing of what's on these peachy DVDs over on this page at TV Shows on DVD, which is your one-stop source on the Internet for info on what old treasures of the cathode tube are coming out on DVD. It's a great place to find out that while you already bought all seven seasons of The West Wing individually, your completist tendencies will force you to also purchase the special "gift set" for yourself, even though it contains the same seven seasons, because it also has extra material available nowhere else. (I need to write more about that scam…)

The "Photo of the Day" over on the Stars and Stripes website is especially cool today. Take a look…and thank Joel O'Brien, who called it to my attention.

Seymour Hersh on the U.S. participation in the Israel-Lebanon conflict.

The other day, I told you that Turner Classic Movies was running Pretty Maids All in a Row this morning. I'm watching it now and I realize I forgot to tell you something about it. I forgot to tell you what a truly crummy film it is.

In my defense, let me assure you I'd forgotten. It was not atypical of many movies that came out around 1970 that couldn't seem to figure out the morality of sleeping around…whether it was a good thing or a bad thing or even, beyond the release of horniness, what it might mean to someone's life. It's almost like movies were afraid to have a point of view on their own sex scenes. They were there because that's what ticket buyers were buying tickets to see and that was more than enough.

There are some other odd things about the movie. I know Rock Hudson wasn't dubbed in this film but for some reason, he sounds like he was. It's also a bit distracting, in light of later revelations and his death, to see Mr. Hudson play an unabashed heterosexual hedonist. And isn't it odd to see Telly Savalas rehearsing to play Kojak? Even though the character had the silly name of Sam Surcher, it's Kojak. I think this is the first time Savalas played that kind of part and it wouldn't surprise me if he got the role of Theo Kojak in that TV-movie because someone saw him in this film.

But really, the "who's killing the co-eds?" plot is so lame with no surprise and no logical throughline. When the film came out, I was baffled as to whether Hudson's character was really as one-dimensional as it seemed or whether I was missing something. My curiosity led me to buy and read the book by Francis Pollini from which the movie was based. I thought it might give me a clue but it didn't. The paperback had a great James Bama cover but no more insight. As I recall — it's been 35 years since I read it — the book had a much stronger racial angle, keying off a young black student who was suspected of the killings. In adapting that work, Gene Roddenberry eliminated that character, thereby creating a murder mystery with no suspects and no clues…and not much of a point.

Still, it was nice to see my old high school…and even nicer to see Angie Dickinson. But I apologize if you went out of your way to watch this one because of me.

The Boomerang Channel is about to begin rerunning Garfield and Friends, a cartoon show I wrote years ago. I think it might play better if they had the show translated into Finnish. See if you don't agree.

On this page of the website of the Transportation Security Administration, one can find a certain amount of information on what one can and cannot now bring onto an airplane…but not a lot. If there's a lot of confusion — and we're hearing there is — it may be because of questions and answers like these…

Question: What about liquid eyeliner and similar items?

Answer: If you are in doubt about an item, please leave it at home or place in your checked baggage or the item may be intercepted at the security checkpoint.

Well, that's helpful…not. One of the folks who was at this morning's breakfast (the one I mentioned in the previous item) was a fellow named Johnny Dark who commutes to New York every week or so to play The World's Oldest Page on the Letterman show. Johnny's going back this weekend and he seemed pretty baffled as to what he'll encounter at the airport and what he can take on the plane. He asked a few questions and no one at the table had any idea.

How difficult would it be in this Age of the Internet to put up a simple list of what you can and cannot take on the plane? Why do they have to turn this into a game show?

Here's a link some of you are really going to enjoy…

This morning, I had breakfast with a gang of comedians and comedy writers. One of the latter was Bob Mills, a gent I'd heard of but never met, and we had a very nice time talking about show business and mutual friends and his career and even a little of mine. Bob's is more interesting as he spent many years in the service of Mr. Robert Hope. Mills was one of those writers that Hope had on call 24/7 and would sometimes phone in the middle of the night and say, "I'm playing the Rutabaga Festival in Jerkwater, Alabama tomorrow. I'll call you back in 90 minutes for some good rutabaga jokes." Some very fine and loyal writers worked that way, and Bob Mills was one of the best. Still is, though he doesn't get many calls from Hope these days.

Mills has posted some of his tales of working with Bob Hope over on this website. They're very good and, of course, straight from one who was there. Many of the anecdotes are accompanied by audio examples and don't pass them up. In fact, don't pass up any part of this splendid memoir.

A few items ago, I was plugging some upcoming showings on Turner Classic Movies. To be of more service to you fine people, I should have noted that TCM seems to have changed its attitude in the last few months. They went through a period where they weren't showing anything that we all weren't sick of seeing and most of it was stuff we all have (or could easily have) in our home video libraries.

But lately, someone there — some wise, kind lover of cinema — has decided to intermingle such selections with some genuine rarities, digging deep into the vast aggregation of acquired companies that represents the Time-Warner film vault. They've also apparently licensed a lot more films that weren't already lying around the office and that offer more esoteric appeal. (In October, they're running two of Russ Meyer's less salacious independent efforts, Mudhoney and Faster, Pussycat, Kill, Kill! Can Mondo Topless be far behind?)

So I'm going to suggest that you browse their listings and to make it easier for you, I'm going to provide some links. Here's what they're showing the rest of this month. Here's what they're running next month. And here's what they're running the month after. Notice that I'm linking to the listings for the Pacific Time Zone because…well, guess where I live, pal.

You may note some strangeness in these schedules…a number of offerings that are "0 minutes" in length and some blanks to be filled in, especially in the October list. These will get filled in as we get closer to the dates in question. You may also notice that someone there still thinks we yearn to see Sabrina, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein and a few others every month but I can't help that. Just enjoy what else they're giving us…and I'll try to point out some highlights with enough advance notice that you can set your TiVos.