Yesterday, I told you I liked Penn and Teller. Today, I tell you I like David Copperfield…at to some extent for the same reasons. Both acts took magic to new places. While I have a great respect for someone who can do the linking rings as well as Jonathan Pendragon or the cups-and-balls as well as Johnny "Ace" Palmer, I also like guys who come out on stage and do something you've never seen before. Or at least, it doesn't look like anything you've ever seen before. (A lot of good "new" magic is putting a new facade on an old structure.)

I know people mock Copperfield's poses and the way he portrays himself…and I find that kind of thing funny and/or creepy when it's done by lesser magicians who haven't his skill or credibility. But there's also a "perfectionist" aspect to his work that I admire and a constant desire to do something different, something that the audience (the members of it not on his payroll) will long remember. Someone posted to Google Video a bit from one of his specials that I heard people discussing in the Ralphs Market, days after it first aired on CBS. It's another one of those tricks that you can figure out if you have the slightest common sense but he does it so well that it works anyway. Here it is…

Well, it looks like Don Imus no longer has the trophy for the most uncomfortable speech at one of these events.

If you just want to catch whatever Stephen Colbert does at the Correspondents' Dinner tonight, C-Span is currently saying that the post-meal program will commence around 9:30 PM (all times Eastern), George W. Bush will speak at 10:05 and the Prince of Truthiness will go on around 10:25. Right after the dinner is concluded, C-Span will re-air the entire thing and they're saying that will start "around Midnight," plus they'll run it all again on Sunday at 12:30, which I assume means 12:30 PM.

That's what they're currently saying on-air. The schedule on the CNN website says something else. This is not unusual for C-Span.

Also, I believe Mr. Colbert is the subject of a story tomorrow night on 60 Minutes.

Here's a birthday shout-out to Lennie Weinrib, one of my favorite friends and one of the most talented. I first worked with Lennie on a show for Sid and Marty Krofft for which he was re-creating the role of H.R. Pufnstuf. Lennie was not only the voice of Pufnstuf but wrote most of that character's first TV series. There was a time there when you couldn't turn on your TV or radio without hearing Lennie: He had hundreds of commercials running and he was on a dozen cartoon shows (including The Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan, written about here a few days ago).

This period followed the one where you couldn't turn on your TV without seeing Lennie doing a guest role on some TV series. One time a few years ago, I was flipping channels on my satellite dish and I caught him simultaneously on reruns of The Munsters and Emergency, plus some channel was running The Thrill of It All, a Doris Day movie in which he had a small role. The still above is from one of his several appearances on The Dick Van Dyke Show. And at some point in there, he also had a period as a film director. Anyone here ever see Beach Ball? Or Wild, Wild Winter?

He's pretty much retired now and living outside the U.S. but we still talk and e-mail, and in honor of his birthday, I'm actually packing up a box of stuff I've been promising to send him for several months now. In fact, I like him so much, I'm even going to go mail it.

Tonight, CNN is rerunning a Larry King Live from last Tuesday on which King interviewed Mark Felt, the gent who was recently revealed to have been Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's infamous source, "Deep Throat." The interview was pre-taped (i.e., not aired live) at Felt's home and it comprised part of the show. The rest of the hour was a live panel discussion with Woodward, Bernstein, Ben Bradlee and members of Felt's family.

The panel discussion is of little interest due mainly to King's lazy interviewing style. At one point, he asked, referring to Felt, "What manner of man is this?" Which might have been an interesting question if he'd directed to Woodward, who had the friendship with Felt and who met him in that parking garage many times and who visited him recently. But King put it to Bernstein, who never met Felt and who speculates with as much authority as you or I might have had. Then King asked Ben Bradlee if he ever had any doubts about Felt's validity and he lets Bradlee get away with talking about how perfectly accurate Felt was as a source. The moment cried out for an interviewer who would cite some of the questionable "facts" Deep Throat is quoted as providing in All the President's Men…but King obviously didn't know about them.

By contrast, in the interview with Felt, King asked most of the right questions, perhaps because he was reading them (in some cases, as if he'd never seen them before) from notes prepared by someone else. The discussion, which looks like it was heavily edited, is actually a pretty decent chat with Felt, who's a lot more lucid than one might expect from some recent accounts. It also may be the only one we're ever going to get so if the story of Deep Throat and Watergate interests you, you might want to catch the replay tonight. Felt praises J. Edgar Hoover and even Richard Nixon…and while I got the feeling that some of his answers were learned for the interview (the whole show is about promoting a new book), what emerges is a somewhat different set of motives than we might have expected. Felt has bad words for no one, which you have to suspect was not his attitude back when he was helping Woodward. He seems to have had a powerful devotion to the law, which more than any goals involving politics or personal benefit may have been his dominant reason for doing what he did.

In the panel discussion, Carl Bernstein couldn't resist making a couple of comments about how he wished more public servants today were like Mark Felt, placing duty to the truth above duty to the boss. A lot of us feel that way.

I don't know quite why this struck me as funny but when I went to tell my TiVo to record the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner tonight, I laughed to see the listing: "President George W. Bush and Stephen Colbert speak." And I had a mental flash of Colbert looking at this and saying, "Hmm…have to do something about the billing order."

I'm a big fan of Penn and Teller…not of everything they do, of course. I think, for example, they're responsible for what I see as an unfortunate belief among some newer magicians. That's the notion that a trick is hip if you can only work some self-mutilation and stage blood into it. But that's okay. One of the things I like about them is that they try different things and aren't afraid to alienate one segment of the audience to entertain another.

For a time, they had a bad name among magicians for allegedly exposing tricks. I thought that was an unfair rap. The few tricks they did expose were the kind that anyone with an I.Q. higher than their shoe size could figure out in ten seconds. The one exposed in today's video link is just such a trick. I figured out how it was done when I was six. I mean, how else could you put a box containing a live human head on the floor unless the rest of the human was under the floor? There would be little entertainment value in doing the trick and pretending it was fooling anyone. There's plenty in doing it in a way that shows you how hard it is to do.

The clip is from a pretty good TV special they did in 1990 called Don't Try This At Home and it runs a little more than three minutes. So let's blast off…

Rush Limbaugh, as you've probably heard, has reached a pretty favorable plea bargain (his lawyer calls it an "agreement") regarding prescription abuses relating to his drug dependency. He is paying a $30,000 fine (his lawyer calls it a payment to defray the public cost of the investigation) which represents something like two hours' income for the radio host.

The initial news reports said "Rush Limbaugh arrested" and his supporters are scurrying to claim that since he turned himself in, the word "arrested" is inaccurate. Not only is it inaccurate, they say, but the use of it is an example of Liberal media bias.

I don't think I buy either spin. The word is probably technically correct. If there's a warrant out for you and you go in and you're booked and they take a mug shot photo of you, you've been arrested, albeit voluntarily. But the word is also misleading. The first thing people think of it you say someone's been arrested is that the cops came and put the cuffs on him, which is not what happened here.

It isn't bias. It's just the way reporters write stories. A few moments ago, I did a Google search on the words "surrendered to police" and one of the first things I found was this item about an NFL player who's out there setting a wonderful example for today's youth…

Green Bay Packers fullback Najeh Davenport was arrested Monday, accused of breaking into a university dormitory and defecating in a woman's closet. Davenport, 23, surrendered to police Monday and was charged with a second-degree felony count of burglary and a misdemeanor count of criminal mischief, said Richard Master, a Miami Shores police spokesman. The former University of Miami player was wanted on a warrant issued in April.

There was a warrant for the guy and he turned himself in…and they used the word "arrested." I think it's a bad choice of word but it's pretty standard for this kind of story. It wasn't used just to make Limbaugh look bad.

And what do you want to bet that if it had been a Democrat or Liberal in exactly the same situation, Rush would be out there proclaiming that a dangerous, immoral criminal had been arrested…and then a bleeding-heart, weak-kneed prosecutor had given him a slap on the wrist instead of throwing the slime in prison where he belongs? I'm not saying that would have been the proper punishment for Limbaugh. But you know that's what he would have said.

Veteran TV-movie writer Harvey Bullock died last Sunday at the age of 84. Bullock was an amazingly prolific author of scripts, usually in partnership with R.S. Allen, whom he met while writing a radio show starring Abe Burrows in 1949. The team of Allen and Bullock went on to become one of the top teams in television writing with credits on The Real McCoys, The Andy Griffith Show, I-Spy, The Dick Van Dyke Show, The Danny Thomas Show, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Bill Dana Show, The Joey Bishop Show, Rango, Hogan's Heroes, Gomer Pyle, Mr. Terrific, My World and Welcome To It, Love American Style, The Doris Day Show, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo, Alice and dozens of others. They also wrote numerous scripts for animation including The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons and Wait 'til Your Father Gets Home. (Bullock and Allen created and produced the last of these.) This is a very partial list, and I should emphasize that Bullock and Allen wrote some of the most memorable episodes of the TV shows listed. For instance, they did 31 episodes of The Andy Griffith Show, including the one about the goat that ate dynamite, the one where Barney Fife had to track down a cow thief, and the one about Aunt Bea entering a pickle-making contest.

In the world of motion pictures, they wrote Honeymoon Hotel, Girl Happy (starring Elvis Presley), A Man Called Flintstone, With Six You Get Eggroll, Don't Drink the Water and one of my favorite unheralded comedies, Who's Minding the Mint?

Bullock's career slowed in 1981 when his partner Ray Allen passed away…though Harvey did team up in '86 with Everett Greenbaum (whose partner Jim Fritzell had died in '79) and together they wrote the highly-rated TV-Movie, Return to Mayberry, which reunited the characters from The Andy Griffith Show.

Harvey's work will live on and so will his name. In 1974, a police lieutenant character was added to the Batman comic books and he soon became a permanent part of that character's mythology. His name is Harvey Bullock and I don't know quite how it happened but he was apparently named after the writer. I'm told he felt honored.

The annual White House Correspondents Dinner is tomorrow night. I always find this interesting because of the tradition of bringing in some comedian — usually someone who does topical humor — to entertain, right in front of the current president and a goodly portion of the Washington establishment. Last year, they had Cedric the Entertainer but the highlight was a speech by Laura Bush. This year, Stephen Colbert will be toplining and I have a feeling he's going to be quite wonderful.

The event airs on C-Span, which will probably repeat it a couple of times over the weekend. You'll have to keep an eye on the ever-changing C-Span schedule to know when but at the moment, they're planning to run a 90 minute live preview at 8 PM Eastern time and the dinner itself at 9:30. Don't believe the part where they say it'll only run an hour.

Here are two articles about why the price of gas is so high, one by Charles Krauthammer and one by Michael Kinsley. Krauthammer says it's all a matter of supply and demand, completely overlooking the question of whether the oil companies are manipulating the supply, or taking advantage of shortages to crank prices up more than necessary. Kinsley says it's all because of the Iraq War and that we should tax windfall profits to help pay for that war. That makes more sense to me but it'll never happen. It won't even be seriously considered.

A full-size replica of the robot from the Lost in Space TV series.

Tired of endlessly replaying William Shatner's stirring interpretation of Elton John's "Rocket Man?" Well, do I have a treat for you. Yes, it's William Shatner performing Harry Chapin's song, "Taxi" on an old episode of Dinah Shore's show. (If the ifilm link below doesn't play in your browser, go here.)

I've been a member of The Magic Castle for something like a quarter of a century…maybe longer. For the benefit of those of you who've never been there, it's a private club in Hollywood for magicians…or people who love magicians…or people who can cough up the initiation fee. You have dinner there — and the food, which once was pretty mediocre, is now pretty good. Then you can wander around and look at curios and wonderful decor and perhaps drop by one of several showrooms where magicians perform all evening. You can find out more about the place over at its website.

If you check out the "Now Appearing" page this week, you'll see that a performer named Jason Alexander is appearing in the Parlour of Prestidigitation. This is the mid-sized showroom there — it seats 68 people — and yes, this is "the" Jason Alexander, the guy from Seinfeld. We all know he can sing and dance and do comedy but it turns out, he also does magic. I don't know how good he is because everyone I know who's gone to see him has been unable to get in. Like I said, the room only seats 68.

But I think it's neat that he's doing it. The Castle is notoriously conservative in how much it pays its performers (some would say "stingy") and I would guess it's the worst money he's worked for in a long time. Of course, it's not like he needs it.

I've just read about a dozen reviews of United 93, the new movie about the fourth plane that was hijacked on 9/11. I will save you the trouble of reading any of them. They all say…

This film was made with great respect and integrity and skill and boy, do I wish I hadn't had to go see it.

It'll be interesting to see what the box office is like this weekend. There may be some kind of "thrill-seeking" audience, like the folks who rushed to see The Exorcist after they heard it caused audience members to faint. But I have the feeling that a lot of people will feel the way I did: Wait and see it at home, if at all. This was an option that wasn't available to those who saw The Exorcist when it came out.