Mitchell Anthony produces and hosts Creating Success, a widely heard podcast that interviews successful creative people about how they do what they do. The guest on his latest installment belies the premise…which is a coy way of saying it's me. If you're an iTunes person, you can hear this show (it runs about ten minutes) at this link. If you're not, here's a link to a plain ol' MP3 download. We mainly discuss what it's like these days to try to break into writing or drawing comic books…

Woody Allen's years as a stand-up comedian are covered in a BBC radio special you can listen to by clicking here. It's about 23 minutes and includes comments from Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise and others. BBC radio shows often do not remain on the website for long so if you want to listen, don't dawdle. And if you enjoy it, don't thank me. Thank Shelly Goldstein, who sent me the link.

Continuing with our extravaganza of video links, here's thirteen minutes of Tom Lehrer performing…

If you've been thinking of buying a TiVo, their lifetime service deal is about to go away. No firm cut-off date has been announced but TiVo dealers are saying that the rumored date is March 15, which is next week. After that, you won't be able to buy lifetime service for any amount of money and certainly not for the current price of $299.

To make sure we're clear on this: When you get lifetime service, it's one machine's lifetime, not your lifetime. When TiVo originally started, they didn't make this clear so they allowed a lot of us early subscribers to transfer our lifetime subscriptions to another machine…once. It can no longer be transferred.

$299 is a great deal if you're going to keep your TiVo twenty-four months or more. I've had two of mine for more than four years and will surely be using at least one for another year or two. If I'd been paying by the month for those two machines, I'd have spent around $700 on each for the service.

A few years ago, there was little question that you would keep a TiVo for more than two years. Today, it's a bit more arguable. The current Series 2 TiVo machines do not handle Hi-Def. The Series 3 machines, which will allegedly be out at the end of the year, will have that capability, as well as the capacity to record two shows at once and there'll be other nifty features, as well. The grapevine suggests, however, that the Series 3 TiVos will lack certain existing features like multi-room viewing, which is the ability to transfer shows from a TiVo in one room to a TiVo in another, assuming you have two TiVos and that you have them networked. If you're thinking you might dump your Series 2 TiVo for a Series 3, lifetime service might not be such a peachy idea. On the other hand, it might be very easy to sell that Series 2 TiVo with lifetime service to someone who doesn't care about High Def.

So the decision's yours. All I'm saying is that if you're going to get lifetime service, you'd better get it now. You have to have the serial number for your TiVo and then order the service from the TiVo website.

You know, for all the touting I do of their products here, you'd think I owned stock in TiVo…but I don't. Maybe I should because one of these days — who knows? — the company might even start showing a profit.

I seem to be on a Google Video kick all of a sudden. Here's a video clip of a high-speed freeway pursuit from Oklahoma that I always thought was remarkable — one of those things that if you saw it in a movie, you'd think was hokey. Click on the little arrow to watch it. It's about two and a half minutes.

In 1972, there was a summer replacement TV series on ABC called The Ken Berry "Wow" Show. I don't understand the name either but that's not important right now. What is important is that someone (not me) is looking for video of this forgotten series to include in an upcoming TV special. If you have any episodes, drop me a line and I'll forward it to the appropriate party.

I swear I didn't retouch this in any way. It's up on the CNN website at the moment (here) and I thought at first I'd made a wrong click and wound up at The Onion. In case you don't get it, the "quack" story is about how some are saying Bush is becoming a lame duck president. That's bad enough but to put it next to a story about Bird Flu…

You know, it can be dangerous to quack around the White House. You might get shot by Dick Cheney.

I often read The Huffington Post but I hadn't realized until the other day that my friend Bob Elisberg is now among their gaggle of pundits. He has three columns up so far and I can recommend them all to you. Here's a link to his page there.

Because there are some things you just can't see too many times…

The other day, we were talking here about product placement, where some company pays to have its product displayed in a scene in a TV show or movie. Michael A. Burstein clues me in to this website, which is for a company that digitally inserts products into such material as part of sponsored placement deals.

As I've been been saying for years, I'm waiting for the day they can digitally take George Lazenby out of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and replace him with Sean Connery. Oh — and while you're at it, I'd like Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly, Angela Lansbury in Mame, Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, Peter Sellers in every Pink Panther movie that didn't have Peter Sellers, and W.C. Fields in the title role of The Wizard of Oz. Somebody get right on these.

Here's an auction you might not want to miss. I can already hear Star Trek fans emptying their bank accounts. (Thanks to Rowby Goren for calling it to my attention.)

This website reports that a study released by the Motion Picture Association of America says that last year's box office receipts were down 7.9% from the year before. This website reports that the ratings on last Sunday's Academy Awards telecast were down 8% from the year before. Anyone think this is a coincidence?

Terry Jones (of Python fame) says he's lost faith in Tony Blair.

Speaking of Mr. Jones, if you haven't visited his website, you've missed out on some nice articles and commentaries, including this interview.

A couple of times in the seventies, I trucked out to the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills to visit Larry Fine, the oft-mauled "middle" member of the Three Stooges. Larry was recovering from a stroke and he welcomed company and a chance to tell his anecdotes, of which he had about a dozen. No matter what you asked him, he told you the same twelve stories. In fact, the second time I was there, he told me one yarn three times. The question everyone apparently put to him was "Did you ever get injured making those movies?" and he'd developed a little five minute monologue/reply that you'd hear if you asked him what time it was.

He also introduced me to other old actors who were living out there, most notably a woman named Babe London who was "the fat girl" in countless films, including some with Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy. Ms. London was thrilled that I knew who she was and she'd try to hijack my visits with Larry, diverting the conversation to her dozen anecdotes, which Larry was thoroughly sick of hearing. So I'd just sit there while she tried to tell me for the third time about being falsely accused of having an affair with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle while Larry would impatiently wait for her to finish so he could tell me for the fifth time about him getting a quill pen stuck in his forehead in one film.

Neither of them was much good for history beyond the little collection of oft-told tales. When I got to speak, which wasn't often, I'd ask something like, "What was Charley Chase like?" And since neither Babe nor Larry had a good Charley Chase story, they'd both say, "He was great." And then Babe would quickly start telling me the Fatty Arbuckle story again while Larry would try to interrupt and tell me one more time about the quill pen. Or if I asked something that actually did jog either's memory, it would suddenly turn into a scene from The Sunshine Boys…

"We had this prop man at Columbia named Tommy Blake…"

"Tommy Blake didn't work for Columbia. He was over at Republic."

"Like hell he was. I used to see him every time I drove on the lot at Columbia and I'd always say, 'Hi, Tommy!'"

"Well, I don't know who you were saying hello to at Columbia because Tommy Blake was at Republic. That's where I said hi to him."

"When did you ever work for Republic?"

In 1973, Larry's autobiography was published. It was called A Stroke of Luck and it's very rare these days. I once turned down $500 for my copy of what may well be the worst-written celebrity autobiography ever. Its other two distinctions are that (a) it probably holds the world's record for the most typographical errors ever in one volume and (b) you rarely see anyone unintentionally get so many of the details of his own life wrong.

I'll tell you how bad it is. If it was about someone else, you'd read a few pages of it and say, "Who wrote this? One of the Three Stooges?"

What's really odd about it is that as per its title, the book tries to view the story of Larry's stroke — the one that put him in a hospital for the rest of his life and took away his ability to walk — as a good thing. I can certainly understand trying to put a positive spin on bad news and can admire the tenacity involved in living with it and overcoming as much of it as can be overcome. But the book is so clumsily authored that at times, it's like Larry's saying, "Thank God I had that stroke…best thing that ever happened to me…you oughta try it."

The book is Larry's autobiography and it's written in the first person, as if by him. But the cover says "by James Carone" on it and there's an author photo of Mr. Carone on the back of the dust jacket. I don't know who Mr. Carone is or was, other than that he seemed to believe that you should never write eight words in a row without inserting at least four commas in there someplace. He even invented a whole new kind of punctuation where you put two or three commas in a row. But he took down Larry's memories and somehow managed to pry more than the usual twelve stories out of him. I suppose we should be grateful that he got as much history as he did out of the Center Stooge. Certainly, a lot of later books about the Stooges have unearthed a couple of true details of Larry's life buried somewhere amidst the errors and commas of Stroke of Luck.

There was a later biography of Larry (entitled simply Larry) by his brother, Morris "Moe" Feinberg, that compensated some for the shortcomings of Larry's book. And now, two very good authors — Stephen Cox and Jim Terry — have written a new book that I'm looking forward to. It's called One Fine Stooge: A Frizzy Life in Pictures and it looks quite well researched and exhaustive. We just may have that definitive Larry Fine biography we've all been waiting for.

Before I leave this topic, I feel like I should include one other memory. I mention it elsewhere on this site but one of the oddest things I ever saw on television was on the local CBS News the evening after Larry died. They hurried a camera crew over to Moe's house to get his reaction and Moe — big surprise — was just devastated. He was crying and having trouble forming words as he talked about Larry and said, "He was like a brother to me…I loved him so…he was my best friend…" And as he spoke, they cut to old footage of Moe breaking pottery over his best friend's head, running a saw across his best friend's scalp and ripping large handfuls of hair out of his best friend's skull. Now, that's friendship.