The Internet is lousy with homemade video parodies — someone putting funny Flash animation to a piece of music. One of the few I've seen that I've liked was done by someone named Paul Heriot. I don't know anything about Mr. Heriot other than that he's a gutsy guy. You see, to make one of these work, you have to come up with imagery that's sillier than the source material…and the source material here is William Shatner's rendition of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds." Not easy to top that one but I think he succeeded…

The folks at DirecTV do more than just send me e-mails about pay-per-view specials I'm not buying. They bring me great movie channels, some of which run great movies. To promote them, they've engaged a great movie critic — my longtime amigo, Leonard Maltin — to host little one minute previews/reviews they call "Maltin Minutes." You can view some of them over on this page…and by the way, there's nothing wrong with your computer. Leonard really does talk out of sync at times. That's what comes from watching too many foreign films.

Hey, it's been a while since we checked to see if Abe Vigoda is still alive.

About two blocks from where I used to live, there's an apartment complex that looks like something transplanted from New Mexico. The buildings are painted in shades of brown and orange, and where you'd expect to find a lawn, there are volcanic rock chips and cactus plants. It all looks very nice — a bit out of place but very nice. Several of my friends will know exactly the location I'm describing and they might be interested in this article about it.

I have no firm opinion of George W. Bush's plans to seal our borders from invading aliens. My suspicion — and this has little to do with Bush or the present administration — is that it's one of those problems that cannot be effectively eliminated. You can put on a show and make it look like you're making a dent in the situation. You can force the violators to take the long way around and not be so visible once they're here. You can even make a few busts, publicize the hell out of them and juggle statistics to argue you're making real progress. That's how "The Drug Problem" has been fought at times, appeasing political constituencies without actually doing much.

I guess I have the feeling that if the Gonzales family in El Salvador wants to live in America badly enough to pick grapes for six bucks an hour — and if some grape growers in the San Joaquin Valley want to pay no more than that to get their crops harvested — a little thing like the National Guard won't keep them apart. Especially since the National Guard is already being strained to the breaking point and this administration ain't so great on the follow-through.

Johnny Carson's home in Malibu. A 7,100 square-foot mansion (with a 2,700 square-foot guesthouse plus a tennis court and God knows what else) on four acres of very expensive land.

Asking price? $42 million and that doesn't include Ed or Doc.

My occasional employers Sid and Marty Krofft will be honored as part of the Makor "Televisionaries" series in New York on Monday, May 22. They'll be present to answer your questions and those of moderator Craig Shemin, plus there'll be clips from Krofft shows like H.R. Pufnstuf and Land of the Lost and The Bugaloos. The festivities start at 7:30 and Craig (a fellow Krofft scribe and Mad World enthusiast) says that if you use the discount code "PCM" when you order, you can save five bucks a ticket. Such a deal. I'm sure it'll be fascinating, as everything about the Kroffts is. I think this link will get you there.

The Boardwalk Casino in Las Vegas is no more. It has ceased to be. We told you here of its impending demise and last Tuesday morning, it blowed up real good. On this page, you can see video of the roof and walls being collapsed by explosives. And if you look real hard through the dust and debris, you may be able to see the buffet, relatively unchanged.

Tyler Cowen on that rare creature, the independent bookseller. Many are dying out and some don't deserve to live.

I don't know much (anything, really) about the person or persons responsible for this…and the bit reminds me a lot of one done a few years ago on Conan O'Brien's show. Still, I laughed out loud at this 2-minute spoof of David Copperfield. I'm putting it up here in the hope that you will enjoy it, too.

Many a reader of this site has suggested I mention the following. In the "Weird Al" Yankovic video to which I linked early this morn, the guy in the car at the end is Greg Kihn, who wrote and performed the original song being parodied. It was called "(Our Love's In) Jeopardy." Curt Alliaume suggests this may have been the first time a musician appeared in a video that parodied his song.

Just looked at the other networks. Fox is carrying the Presidential Address live at 8:00 PM (Eastern Time) and has allotted twenty minutes for it. My TiVo guide for the New York Fox affiliate, WNYW, has Prison Break starting at 8:20, 24 starting at 9:20, Fox 5 News at 10 starting at 10:20, a Seinfeld rerun at 11:20…then they have a very odd thing listed: A Simpsons episode starting at 11:50 PM. What's odd about that? It's listed as a ten-minute episode. Reruns of That '70s Show follow at Midnight and 12:30 AM.

Then we go over to KTTV, which is the Los Angeles Fox outlet. They have the Presidential Address from 5:00 to 5:20, followed by a ten-minute episode of King of the Hill. Then everything else after runs its usual length and starts on the hour or half-hour.

Are they really chopping an old Simpsons episode and a rerun of King of the Hill down to ten minutes apiece? Or do they just figure to join them in progress? Bizarre either way.

ABC's Monday night schedule, at least on my TiVo, shows no sign of including Bush's speech.

Neither does CBS's. The oddity here is that Two and a Half Men runs 31 minutes and then the show that follows — The New Adventures of Old Christine — is a 29-minute show starting at 9:31. I wish they'd stop doing this.

My TiVo schedule has been updated to reflect the odd running times of Deal or No Deal tomorrow night. Thanks to my satellite, I get both the East Coast and West Coast feeds. The East Coast feed of the show starts at 5:25 PM (Pacific Time) and runs one hour and 35 minutes. The West Coast feed starts at 8:00 PM and runs for two hours. Just to compare, I've set up to record both.

This may seem like a trivial matter to some of you but I really think the future of television will have a lot to do with the accurate delivery of programming to our video recorders or home media centers, including the ability to adjust for breaking news, live shows that run long, etc. With Internet connectivity, this should be quite possible and the folks who deliver our shows to us are going to have to have a quick response time to changes. Nice to see us moving in that direction.

Tuesday morning in the wee small hours, Fox Movie Channel is airing the 1970 movie, Myra Breckenridge, starring Raquel Welch and Rex Reed as each other, and John Houston and Mae West trying to see which of them can do a better job of making you forget the good things they were once involved with. It's not Skidoo…but it's close.

The film is a fascinating relic of a period in the movie industry when the folks in charge were largely clueless about what they should be making in order to compete with television. A few years earlier, the consensus in some quarters had been that the only thing movies could offer than you couldn't get on the small screen was the big screen. Some predicted that soon, every film would be on the grand scale of Ben-Hur or Cleopatra and that instead of making a lot of small-to-medium budget movies each year, the majors would collectively produce perhaps a dozen huge-budget flicks. As some of those huge-budget flicks flopped, execs learned the danger of putting all of one's eggs in a lone basket and began pondering how else they might draw viewers from their homes and into theaters.

The other obvious thing movies could offer than TV couldn't was more adult fare but the major studios were too conservative to follow that line of thinking to its logical conclusion. As a result, we had this period when they were making half-assed, clumsy attempts to be adult without offending the masses. At the same time, Newsweek told them there was this "youth movement" on in the country — it may have had something to do with some war in Asia at the time — and since teens and young adults go on dates (i.e., buy movie tickets), there was this massive attempt to pander to them, mostly made by people who hadn't a clue how to do that. That's how we got things like Skidoo and The Strawberry Statement and Vanishing Point and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Some were good, some weren't but they all gave off these odd pheromones of someone clumsily trying to appeal to an audience they didn't understand.

I dunno what they thought the audience was for Myra Breckenridge but it turned out to be people who wanted to go laugh at how awful a movie could be. The reviews were dreadful and it didn't help matters that Rex Reed wrote a lengthy article for Playboy that soundly trashed the writer-director as incompetent and unable to even shoot the movie he'd set out to make. (As opposed to Skidoo where, I gather, Otto Preminger made exactly the movie he envisioned and it still didn't make a lick of sense.)

To see Myra Breckenridge is to feel sorry for everyone involved. Mae West sure didn't deserve that as her next-to-last movie (didn't deserve her last one, Sextette, either but there she mostly had herself to blame). I am not suggesting you watch this and I'm not even including a link to buy the DVD because you definitely don't want to do that. But you should know that it's there, if only so you can step gingerly around it.

I discovered Dr. Demento's radio show around 1972, shortly after he first began broadcasting in that identity. It was a regular Sunday night ritual for a long time and I even rigged up a device to tape him when I couldn't listen live. His show then was a cornucopia (that's the first time I've used that word on this weblog) of rare and funny "novelty records" by the likes of Spike Jones, Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman and a lot of folks I hadn't previously heard of. Later on, my interest petered out as he began playing what I felt were too many homemade and garage recordings by amateurs. It was great that he was giving these folks some exposure but, well, you know…not one of them was Spike, Stan or Allan. Still later, the Good Doctor seems to have come to his senses and the pendulum swung back to a nice mix of new and old and I now give a listen whenever I can.

What prompted so many musicians to create songs for Dr. Demento to play was that he made a star out of one guy who submitted a tape — "Weird Al" Yankovic. He first played one of Al's homemade efforts around '76 and then a few years later, "My Bologna" (a parody of The Knack's "My Sharona") became a frequent entry on the Demento Funny Five. "Weird Al" became a genuine recording artist/star and the guy deserves it. His records are well-produced, his parodies work and he's often very funny. These three things are not true of most of the folks out there who think they can be "Weird Al." But they're true of "Weird Al."

Our feature presentation is one of his earlier efforts — the music video for "I Lost on Jeopardy," complete with appearances by Art Fleming and Don Pardo, who hosted and announced the show in its first incarnation. And Dr. Demento's in there, too.