Quite a few of you have written to inform me of the origin of Pancake Day. This e-mail from Brent McKee seems to provide a good summary…

Pancake Day is actually Shrove or Fat Tuesday, the last Tuesday before the commencement of Lent. It's the last day for eating an assortment of tasty treats. In England — from which Canada and most of the United States derives its traditions — this meant pancakes. In Newfoundland, the tradition is to put trinkets like coins and rings into the pancake. The person who finds a particular trinket has good luck in a particular area — the one who finds the coin will get rich, the one who finds the ring will get married in the next year, and so on. In some areas of the United States, the tradition varies. In Detroit, for example, you never hear of "Pancake Day", it's "Paczki Day" (pronounced "punchky") where they eat "paczkis" which are sort of a Polish fruit pastry which seems to resemble a jelly donut. In New Orleans, the tradition is (besides getting women to show off their breasts for beads) to eat "King Cake." As in the Newfoundland tradition, a trinket of some sort is found in the cake, with the person who finds it becoming "king" of the party.

Yeah, but what do you get in the free pancakes at IHOP? Or don't I want to know? I don't want to know.

I've also received a number of e-mails from folks telling me their horror tales of shopping at Radio Shack…and from two different folks, their unhappy experiences working in those establishments. Almost everyone mentioned the policy Radio Shack once had (I remember this, too) of demanding your address and phone number any time you made a purchase, no matter how tiny. I once bought a 10-cent battery there and had to give them that info, despite the fact that I was already receiving six or seven copies of every Radio Shack catalog. It took me a while to figure out, as I'm sure others realized, that the thing to do was to give them a bogus address and phone number.

Two people within the confines of KNBC wrote to me, separately, that they know their hi-def signal is occasionally out of synch and that they can't understand either why no one there is concerned about it. I'm not so much concerned about it as amazed. At every station, there's a department called something like Master Control that is responsible for monitoring the outgoing broadcast 24/7 and making sure it's as close to perfect as possible. The folks in those divisions are usually fiercely diligent…although once, I was in the NBC network Master Control in New York and the guys in there were watching The Price is Right on CBS because they'd been tipped off that there were major bikinis in the Showcases at the end. And once, I was in Master Control at ABC and the guys there were watching porn, which struck me as just plain dangerous. They were one wrong button-push away from replacing Grace Under Fire with Grace Under Fred. But that kind of behavior is not typical. Usually, they catch transmission problems and do everything necessary to correct them, long before any viewers phone in.

Lastly, many have written to tell me of other "Who's on First?" variations that have been done in recent years besides the one by the Credibility Gap. This Wikipedia page lists a lot of them, including one I wrote. I still think it's an incredibly stupid routine that works in spite of itself.

Several hours later, the hi-def feed on KNBC Los Angeles is still out of synch. I think it's less pronounced than it was earlier but Mr. Leno's mouth is not moving precisely in accord with his audio.

To answer a couple of questions I've received: No, it's not my set. All the other channels are fine. And I talked to my friend Earl Kress who lives out in the valley and it's out of synch on his TV, too. He's noticed it several times in the past, too.

I just called NBC again and a bored-sounding operator heard me out and said, "I'll report it." Betcha nothing changes tonight.

This just amazes me. You'd think there'd be some NBC executive sitting at home, watching his or her network on a big hi-def plasma screen who'd notice this, call in and demand it be fixed. Apparently, they either can't afford good sets or they don't watch their own channel.

My longtime friend Dan Gheno gets a good letter-to-the-editor published in the New York Daily News. It's about halfway down this page.

I'm watching Deal or No Deal on our local NBC affiliate, KNBC, via their high-definition feed. This is about the seventh time I've tuned to this channel since I got my new TV and it's about the fifth time the video has been out of sync with the audio.

It's also about the fifth time I've called KNBC about it and don't think that's easy because the only phone number they seem to have listed is for the KNBC Newsroom. Each time, I call there and someone forwards my call to what they say is the appropriate department. I explain to the person who answers there what the problem is and they always say, "Let me forward you to the people who handle that," and they proceed to forward my call back to the same guy in the KNBC Newsroom, who of course has nothing to do with that.

He then tries forwarding me to someone else and eventually, I get to someone who seems to actually be in charge of the transmission they're beaming to all of Southern California. This person says something like, "Not again" and promises to get it fixed right away. The last four times, it hasn't been fixed, at least before I gave up and turned to a regular-def channel.

I don't understand this. I can't be the only human being watching NBC in high-def in this half of the state. And yet, in spite of how difficult they make it to reach the person in charge of their broadcast, I seem to be the only person calling up to say, "Uh, excuse me, but could you get the actor's lips to match the words coming out of their mouths?" It's like watching Godzilla except for the parts with Raymond Burr. I think I know where the guys who weren't good enough to work for RadioShack are getting jobs.

RadioShack has announced they'll soon be closing between 400 and 700 of their 7000 outlets. Blogger Rudy Panucci has a thought…

I've got a suggestion: How about actually having stores filled with electronics and the parts needed to repair them, and hiring sales people who care about what they're doing and have a clue about what they're selling?

You can read what else Rudy has to say but when I read the above, I thought, "He's right." The last few times I've been into a RadioShack — and I've been to maybe four different ones in the last year to pick up a cable or an adapter or something — there's been no one in the place with a clue as to what they had, let alone what to do with it. As Rudy notes, all the people there know how to do is to try and sell you a cell phone.

I went into one a few months ago to buy an extra-loud ringer for my mother's phone. The salesman told me they didn't have any such device and that I should buy a whole new phone with a loud ringer on it. I explained that her phone already had a loud ringer on it and that we wanted something louder. I easily found just such a device on the store's shelves and the salesguy — who said he'd been working there for more than two years — looked at the thing and said, "Gee, is that what these do?"

I bought it, took it to my mother's home, installed it and discovered it didn't work. I took it back and, lucky me, got the same clerk who suggested maybe I'd installed it wrong. (You plug the phone into it and it into the wall. A blind Amish person could get this one right.) I finally got him to exchange it for another one on the shelf…and watched as he put the one I said was broken back in its box and back on sale for someone else to buy.

I'm sure the rise of the Internet has hurt RadioShack sales since it's now possible to order any electronic part in the world online with a few mouse-clicks. But I wonder if World Wide Webbing has also harmed the company by draining the supply of folks who have a little bit of "tech" sense but are willing to work for minimum wage. I'm guessing those folks now have better options and RadioShack is stuck with too many of the ones who think that when a piece of software says "Press any key to continue," they're supposed to look for a key that says "any" on it.

Here, recommended to me wisely by Marty Golia, is a short but very good audio story from NPR on the Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax. I wrote a brief article on the esteemed film palace some years back and you can read it here. Or you can go off this site and read a longer one here.

You can also visit the website of the Silent Movie Theatre where, they say, a book on the history of the place will be out in May of this year.

Want to see some clips of Don Knotts at his best? Want to see them on your own computer screen? The folks over at LikeTelevision have put up some on this page. Matter of fact, there's a lot of neat non-Knotts stuff on their site you might enjoy.

A couple of folks wrote me to point out an interesting point I should have included in some post. As I mentioned, Andy Griffith did something very wise by allowing Don to run away with The Andy Griffith Show. Ron Howard, who was then playing Andy's son, seems to have learned well. Years later, he sure profited by allowing Henry Winkler to run away with Happy Days.

Jon Stewart is on Larry King Live tonight. I wish Costas was guest-hosting but I don't think he is.

Sorry to say I never got to meet Dennis Weaver. I always liked him as an actor and respected him as a human being. The obits (like this one) only touch upon the fine non-acting work he did to make the world a better place. Especially impressive were the efforts of L.I.F.E., a group he headed up that fed hungry people and probably saved an awful lot of human lives. His work for ecological causes was level-headed and never hysterical, and I hope it continues without him.

Weaver had a pretty glorious career in television, starring in many a series. He practically stole Gunsmoke from Jim Arness, then went on to do Gentle Ben and Kentucky Jones, which were both good shows. Then Fess Parker turned down the lead in McCloud, Weaver was cast and you had a perfect match of actor and role. Even Parker later said that Weaver was better in the part than he would have been.

I never heard a bad word about Dennis Weaver. Once, when he was suggested for a part in a show I wrote, a very important network person grinned and said, "He's always money in the bank." Translation: He was always good in what he did, never caused trouble and audiences loved him. I'm sorry that project never went forward because I really wanted to meet the man and tell him how much I admired him.

For several weeks now, I've been having a very civil and mutally-enlightening e-mail debate with a friend about Iraq. Neither of us has an opinion set in concrete, though I tend to think our presence there is making things worse and he leans towards believing we could still wind up being glad we've done what we've done.

I asked him to suggest an article I could link to here that would make the best possible case for his position. He came back with a piece by Lawrence Kaplan written for the New Republic magazine. No matter how you feel about the war, you might want to read it and also this brief rebuttal by Matthew Yglesias.

I still would love to believe Iraq is not the biggest mistake ever made in the category of U.S. Foreign Policy. If someone else can point me to an article that makes a stronger case, I'd like to read it and link to it.

Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, always talked about being raised in Paterson, New Jersey. It was his hometown and he was proud of it. Returning the favor the town of Paterson is tooling up to celebrate what would have been Lou's 100th birthday with a big Lou Costello celebration. This article will tell you all about it. [Warning: It's one of those sites that will ask you for your age and sex and zip code.]

One correction to the article: Lou most definitely did not write the team's signature routine, "Who's on First?" It was an old burlesque routine that they cleaned up and polished and made their own. It's also, as has been noted by several scholars of comedy, one of the most contrived bits of all time, founded as it was on the dubious premise that "they give baseball players odd names these days." Really? Was there ever a baseball player named Who? Or anything remotely like that? The piece actually made more sense when the satire troupe called The Credibility Gap parodied it and had a rock promoter deciding that at his concert, he was going to put The Who on first. There really was a rock group called The Who.

But of course, logic doesn't matter when they're laughing, and people laughed long and hard at Bud Abbott and Lou Costello arguing about an infield peopled with interrogative pronouns. Costello, when he was on target — which wasn't all the time — was a great comedic performer, and Abbott was one of the best straight men ever in comedy. They were probably better than a lot of their movies, most of which I find a lot more tedious now than I did when I was eleven.

You know what I wish? I wish someone would make an MP3 player that looks like a Pez dispenser. That would be great. That would be so neat. But of course, it'll never happen. Or will it?

Good article on Jon Stewart and what he might do on the Oscar telecast. It's a Los Angeles Times piece so you may have to register. But is that so much to ask?

…though it may only mean something to folks who watched TV in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies. It's for Edward Nalbandian. Now, who the heck is Edward Nalbandian?

He was the proprietor of the huge discount men's clothing store down on Wilshire, Zachary All. In fact, he was Zachary All, which was a made-up name. Eddie turned up constantly on L.A. TV doing his own commercial spots and in one, which only ran eight times an hour for about five years, he said, of his store's prices on the new double-knit suits, "My friends all ask me, 'Eddie, are you kidding?' And I tell them no, my friend, I am not kidding." This line prompted rocker Frank Zappa to write and record a very funny, successful (at least in L.A.) record, "Eddie, Are You Kidding?"

I had one personal encounter with Eddie. I wrote about it in this article though I didn't use his name. But read down to the last part and you'll recognize he's the guy I was talking about. And if you'd like to know more about Eddie and Zachary All, here's a link to an article from The Los Angeles Business Journal that tells about him.

Here's a great photo of Don Knotts holding one of his five Emmy Awards and posing with Carl Reiner and Peter Falk. And I can't help but note that we have here three people who were in the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

A couple other thoughts. Barney Fife was one of the all-time great TV characters and we have Andy Griffith to thank for that, and not just for casting Don. There have been a lot of stars who simply would not have allowed someone else to walk off with their program the way Andy let Don Knotts dominate The Andy Griffith Show. Oh, they'd let the producers hire someone funnier than them…but they sure wouldn't let him be funnier in that many episodes. Andy was wise enough to let Don be Don and it sure didn't hurt either man's career.

At the end of five years of Griffith shows, Don left. CBS offered very large dollars to keep him on their network and there was brief talk of a spin-off show that would have moved Barney Fife to a bigger city as a detective. Knotts wasn't interested. He'd signed with Universal to do movies and he did several…to sadly diminishing returns. It was mostly a matter of bad timing. The film industry was changing then and he was a few years late to be doing non-Disney family comedies. Even Jerry Lewis was no longer packing them in with that kind of material.

I don't know what Don's best movie was from this period — maybe The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — but the most interesting is probably The Love God?, which was a halting attempt to do something a tad more adult. The film was written and directed by Nat Hiken, the gent who'd brought us Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? I've always wanted to find a copy of the original screenplay for The Love God? — not the version Hiken directed but an earlier draft that was, legend has it, quite unlike the finished film and absolutely hysterical. It was to have co-starred Phil Silvers but Silvers was undergoing emotional problems at the time and declined. For reasons unknown, Hiken then despoiled his own script and made, as the last thing he did before he died, a not very good movie. I once got to ask Don about all this and he just shook his head and said, yes, Hiken had written a wonderful script and somehow — Don didn't know how — they wound up not making it.

There's actually a bit of irony to The Love God? Don's character was a meek little guy who was transformed into quite the ladies' man. In real life, Don was probably closer to that persona — or at least to would-be swinger Ralph Furley on Three's Company — than he was to Barney Fife.

When that film crashed and burned, Knotts decided to return to television and that's when he had some more bad luck. CBS still wanted him and he might have been a better fit in their schedule. But he couldn't do TV without a release from his movie deal with Universal…and Universal was mainly in business then with NBC, which wanted Don, if only to keep him off CBS. A deal was finally brokered which went something like this: NBC agreed to pick up a faltering Universal series, The Virginian, for another season in exchange for which the studio released Knotts to do TV…but only for NBC. Don reluctantly accepted the deal and soon regretted it.

NBC initially scheduled The Don Knotts Show for a great time slot on Thursday nights and pencilled in their other new variety series for the fall of 1970, The Flip Wilson Show, for a less-promising period on Tuesday. Then someone noticed a problem. On Tuesday, Flip Wilson would follow Julia, a sitcom with Diahann Carroll. That would put the only two shows on the network with black stars back-to-back, creating what some might criticize as a ghetto or some kind of schedule segregation. To escape this, they flipped Flip, giving Mr. Wilson the better berth on Thursday and consigning Don's program to a less-than-ideal day and hour. It was a pretty good show but it didn't get much of a chance. Wilson's show, on the other hand, thrived. A close friend of Don's once told me it was one of only two professional matters about which Don had lingering bitterness, the other being how little money he made off Andy Griffith Show reruns.

He was never out of work, of course. He still did movies and constant TV guest appearances before he joined Three's Company. But he never had that big hit he wanted as the one and only star of something. He was always teamed with someone like Tim Conway or cast in what was clearly a supporting role. Still, no one was ever more loved by audiences…and the times I saw Don in person and out in public, I got the feeling that he was aware of that but some part of him still could not believe it. When you told him how wonderful he was, he still blushed a bit and acted like you'd done him a tremendous favor, even though you were at least the eightieth person to tell him that in the past hour. But he was wonderful…in everything he ever did. If you don't believe me, ask anyone. They'll tell you.