That's right: Two for the price of one! Not only is today the 80th birthday of Soupy Sales but Larry Storch is 83 years old today…or maybe tomorrow. Depending on which source you consult, the star of TV's F Troop was born either January 8 or 9. There's no doubt though that he's one of the funniest comic actors to ever work in television…and did you know he also did a lot of cartoon voice work in the sixties? He was on Tennessee Tuxedo and The Groovie Goolies and a whole batch of other shows. I even brought him in once to do some voices on Garfield and Friends, partly because I thought he'd be great (he was) and partly because I just wanted to meet him and tell him how terrific I always thought he was in everything.

Legend has it that Storch's big break came when he got a role on a radio show starring Frank Morgan, who was best known for playing The Wizard of Oz in The Wizard of Oz. Morgan, the story goes, lost his reading glasses during a rehearsal — or in some accounts, just before going on the air live. Storch, who was a fine mimic, came to the rescue and not only did his own role but also read Morgan's lines in a perfect imitation. (That was his Frank Morgan impression you heard when he voiced Professor Phineas Whoopee on Tennessee Tuxedo.) He went on to a grand career on stage, in clubs, on TV and in the movies. He's still performing, mostly in theater…so happy returns of the day, Larry Storch. Either today or tomorrow.

Frank Rich on the whole Wiretaps Without Warrants matter. And for what it's worth, I think Rich misses the point on one matter. He writes…

If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.

It isn't that the terrorists on whom our nation eavesdrops would assume the White House would ignore legal restraints. It's that it doesn't matter. The warrants that the administration should be getting under the NSA act are secret warrants. The terrorists couldn't possibly know or care if procedure is followed or not.

Eighty years ago today, a baby was born in North Carolina who was destined to become a TV superstar…and also to get hit in the face with tens of thousands of shaving cream pies. Kids today have no one on television — absolutely no one — they could possibly feel as close to as my friends and I did to Soupy Sales during the years he lit up Los Angeles television. And kids who were the proper age when he worked in Detroit and New York feel the same way, I know. It wasn't just that he did one of those all-too-rare shows that though ostensibly for children held just as much delight for grown-ups. And it wasn't just that he did it without writers or much of a budget or even (much of the time) more than one person in his supporting cast. Soupy was just plain the most fun person to watch on TV when I was eight. He was also, for my classmates and me, a huge influence. We never talked to big dogs or wiseguy salesmen who hurled meringue our way but we did repeat his jokes and even, in our everyday speech, made feeble attempts to repeat his timing. Soupy "connected" with us like no one else I've ever seen on the screen.

Some time back, I wrote this article about him which was reprinted (with my permission, natch) in his autobiography. Beyond that, there isn't much I can say except to wish Soupy a happy 80th. I hear he's bouncing back from some health problems, which is great news. Here's hoping he has a great big cake today and that nobody throws it at him.

The lovely Carolyn Kelly and I are back from the debut performance of Scott Shaw!'s Oddball Comics presentation at the Acme Comedy Theater in Hollywood. First of all, here are the details on how you can attend. Secondly, attend. If you are anywhere near Los Angeles, get thee to the Acme next Saturday night or a Saturday night not long after. For at least the next few weeks, Scott will be doing his show Saturday night at ten there and those who show up will have a very good time. I laughed a lot and so did everyone around me as Scott displayed bizarre comic book covers from his bizarre collection and delivered incisive, clever commentary. Four stars, two thumbs up, three cheers and tiger for me. End of plug.

On December 28, the Rasmussen Poll announced that it had recently surveyed Americans and determined that…

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

Today, results were released of an AP-Ipsos poll that said…

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. 56 percent of respondents…said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Now, let's assume for the moment that both these polls are correct — a small assumption with the AP one, a larger one with Rasmussen but still, in both cases, an assumption. These two polls are not mutually exclusive. If I believe the Bush administration should be allowed to snoop on the phone calls of terrorist suspects but should do so only with warrants and judicial oversight, I'd be with the majority in both polls. The thing is: Neither poll reflects the actual situation. Neither is really asking about the law as it currently stands.

The NSA law allows the administration to eavesdrop on just about anybody it wants. They're supposed to get a warrant before they do it but if they feel time is of the essence, they can do it immediately and then they have 72 hours to secure the warrant afterwards. Some people don't seem to know about this last part. A lot of Bush defenders are arguing for his position as if complying with the law as written means that they have to go to a judge beforehand and therefore can't act swiftly. Not so. They just have to let this secret court that was set up to keep an eye on wiretaps know what they're doing.

The controversy is not about whether if Osama bin Laden phones you, the government should be listening in. It's about whether the Bush administration can overlook a law that was set up to govern how wiretaps would be done, and can conduct them without any oversight, either before or after the fact. How come nobody's polling on how we feel about that?

Glenn Greenwald refutes the argument that it harmed National Security for the New York Times to reveal that our government spies on phone calls without obtaining warrants. I think he's right. They didn't aid terrorists in any way. All they did was to point out that the Bush administration may be violating the law.

Robert Faires writes to ask about the Peanuts reprints that are currently being made available to newspapers…

Sometime in the last week or two, Peanuts jumped way back in time. I don't really recall what time frame the strips were in before the jump — early to mid-seventies, I'd guess — but now they look to be late fifties/early sixties, and considerably earlier than the period of strips when they started the "classic" repeats around the time of Schulz's illness and passing. It's not that I mind at all, since I actually like the era these strips are from better than the seventies and later, when the characters and humor took a turn that didn't work as well for me, but it struck me as a curious move, one that kind of came out of nowhere, and I wondered if you had any reaction to it.

Well, the first thing that needs to be explained here is that United Feature Syndicate offers two different groups of vintage strips to its subscribing newspapers. One set is from the nineties (though it hasn't always proceeded in sequence) and the other started with 1974 strips and then jumped back to 1973 strips and then to 1972 and so on. The idea here as I understand it is that some papers wanted the older strips and were willing to deal with the fact that they have different proportions than most modern-day strips. Some weren't and so they run strips from after Mr. Schulz adjusted his dimensions to match everyone else's.

Anyway, the older package was in the middle of a 1969 storyline about Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy going to a sports banquet to meet the round-headed kid's hero, Joe Shlabotnik. On January 1, they suddenly abandoned that story and hopped from 1969 to 1959. (Today's strip is from January 10, 1959.) My reaction? I think it would be neater if they'd started in the late fifties and worked forward but it's all wonderful stuff. As we'll probably all discover after Fantagraphics has more of its wonderful Peanuts archive books out, it's quite arguable when the strip "got good." A lot of it depends on how you take to the gradual humanization of Snoopy and the focus on his fantasies. Some thought that was when the strip stopped being about children…and of course, others thought it was never about children. Personally, I thought Schulz began to hit repetitive patches in the seventies so that was never the ideal place to start. In a sense, I thought the last ten or twelve years of strips were better than the ten or twelve years that preceded them but they're all worthy of another look.

I dunno who to thank for this nice plug over at the Scoop website. But thank you, whoever wrote it. The whole site is a pretty good read and one we recommend. Even when they don't talk about me.

Sorry to hear the news that the title of the record album at right — Lou Rawls Live — is no longer applicable. If you never got to hear the man perform in person, you missed out on a wonderful experience. Talk about having a voice that you play like a fine musical instrument.

I met Lou a few times but only one anecdote comes to mind this morning. About ten years ago, I directed him in a short voiceover job. It was a never-aired animation pilot based on the comic strip, The Boondocks Jump Start, [Correction] and he was playing one of the main roles. He was very good and after we thought he'd left, one of the engineers said, "It must be hell to have every woman who hears you sing want to sleep with you." Lou, who'd overheard the comment out in the hallway, leaned back in, flashed a big grin and said, "Man, I wish it worked like that." Having seen him once in Vegas, I have a feeling it almost did.

I won't be posting much today but e-mail I've received lately prompts me to mention…

• Yes, I know Howard Stern's available "on cable TV" via the iN Demand (that's how they type it) service. That's just the videotaped radio show without the bleeps and blurs. I think one of these days, he's going to do a real show for HBO or Showtime or one of those and it'll be a huge success.
• Yes, I know there are some practical applications in math and encryption to having the largest possible prime number. It's just not something I figure on using in my life. Not unless I have to tally the number of mistakes of the Bush administration.
• Yes, I know there are a few remaining outposts of the restaurant chains I described as "extinct (or nearly-extinct)." That's what the part in the parentheses meant.

Back soon with more fun stuff as soon as I catch up on some deadlines. Ta-ta.

The only three certain things in this world are Death, Taxes and Pat Robertson saying something really, really stupid and divisive.

Larry King's guest tonight is Howard Stern, thereby proving that even two guys who loathe each other can get along for an hour if they think it'll help their ratings.

Tip for Howard Stern, who I know doesn't read this site: Next time Mr. King berates you for having naked women on your radio show and talking about sexual stuff, ask him about the time he had Marilyn Chambers on his radio program. She invited him to have sex with her during the news break and then to discuss it in the following segment. Not only did they attempt it but The Iron Horse of Broadcasting (L.K.) was, perhaps understandably, unable to perform in such an odd circumstance. For all of Stern's "littering the airwaves," as King has put it in the past, I don't think he's ever gone that far with a guest, at least during a broadcast.

As everyone in the world has heard eleven times by now, Howard Stern's radio show moves to Sirius radio next Monday. I won't be springing for a Sirius subscription because of it but I'll bet a lot of people have or will. Frankly, I sometimes like Stern when he's doing a one-on-one conversation with a guest. When he wants to be, and when the guest has something to say, Howard is a very good interviewer. But every time I've tuned him in the last few years, the premise has been to bring in some poor young lady who cluelessly thinks an appearance on The Howard Stern Show will help her career, and get her to disrobe and/or talk about her sex life while Stern's cohorts insult her I.Q. and (often) her appearance. Or sometimes, they bring in some geeky, slightly-retarded male and abuse him. Neither fits into any known definition of Entertainment for me but, hey, someone must like it. Stern has always done well and one of these days, some cable TV channel will put him on uncensored and they'll all make so much money, they'll have to digitize it and store it on CD-Rom.

Nice to see that Newt Gingrich has come out against members of Congress taking money from lobbyists and special interests. I'm planning on coming out against overweight Jews having weblogs.

For those of you following the saga of Stan Lee Media, this latest development.

Jon Stewart to host the Oscars this year…

There's no cleverer comedian working today so in that sense, he's a good choice. The problem is that he's probably not a first choice. The crop of movies that will be competing suggest one of those years when few people have seen enough of the nominated films — or have enough emotion about them or their makers — to tune in to the award telecast.

There's always a tendency to credit/blame the host if the Oscar ratings go up or down, which is probably unfair. The host doesn't do that much and the bulk of the show is what it is. Some years, we care a lot about who wins Best Actress and some years we don't. This is looking like a "don't" year which is probably why it won't be Billy Crystal or Steve Martin doing that opening monologue. They don't want it said that the ratings dipped on their watch lest it taint their respective movie stardoms. It wouldn't surprise me if a few others — maybe Robin Williams, maybe Tom Hanks, maybe someone else — turned it down before the call went out to the host of The Daily Show.

Stewart, of course, has little to lose. He's not concerned with being a movie star. If the ratings for the Oscar telecast are strong, he'll get a lot of credit and some industry heat. If they aren't…well, what do you expect from some guy on a cable channel? The funny thing is that he'll probably have very little to do with those ratings, either way.