Okay, I don't think he reads this weblog but maybe somebody does who could call this to his attention…

Bill…I'm watching you on Larry King Live, and you just said some very nice things about Johnny Carson. But then you said to Larry, "Sim holla bim," and explained that you use that phrase often because it was what Johnny always said when he was playing Carnac the Magnificent. Not quite.

The phrase is "sim sala bim." These were the magic words coined and made famous by the late, great magician, Dante. It's sometimes spelled as one word — "simsalabim" — but the middle part starts with an "S," not an "H." This became a very famous phrase/word in the world of professional magicians, and many a rabbit-producer utilized them. Carson probably used it when he was in that line of work. (You can see Dante in action in a Laurel and Hardy feature, A-Haunting We Will Go. He says "sim sala bim" about eight thousand times in it.)

I agree with some of what you said on the show about the environment and the War in Iraq and Social Security and the deficit, and disagree with other things…but that's trivia. Misquoting Carson and Dante is monumental.

Over on Slate, Timothy Noah explains why William Rehnquist could not have been Deep Throat. But more interesting is the assertion that the "Deep Throat is dying" rumor may be bunk. This would not surprise me.

Like me, Noah thinks D.T. was Mark Felt or Fred Fielding. Like me, he thinks there was a Deep Throat, and he explained why some time ago in this article.

A couple of folks have written me with their concern or belief that one of these days, when one of the suspects dies, Bernstein and Woodward will just say, "It was him," and we'll be expected to take their word for it. One reader wrote that he doesn't believe there was a Deep Throat and won't believe a posthumous revelation without a hell of a lot of proof. At the same time, I received this from my pal, Mike Catron…

Some years back (probably 2002, which was the 30th anniversary year of the Watergate break-in), Woodward was live on a C-Span call-in show discussing Watergate. As you know, I do a lot of videotaping at conventions, but I've also done sit-down recollections with comics pros and relatives and done a bit of cinema verité on the little town in which I live. Anyway, I faxed or e-mailed C-Span during the program and, by golly, the host (it was probably Brian Lamb, but I don't remember for sure anymore) read my question to Woodward.

I suggested that, come the day Throat's identity is finally revealed, it's conceivable that certain folks might decide to cry "foul" and claim that the recently-departed figure, not able to defend himself any longer, was not Deep Throat at all, that Woodward had just chosen someone and smeared their memory, their service to their country, etc. And that there never really was a Deep Throat. I suggested that Woodward might want to head off such criticism by videotaping a discussion with Deep Throat to get the man's story in his own words. (I was ready to jokingly offer my services to record such a conversation, but I think I dropped that at the last minute).

Woodward's response? "Interesting."

So, did such a tape already exist by then? Or might my "conversation" with Woodward have prompted him to arrange such a taping? Either way, I hope so, on a number of levels. As much as you hope there's a manuscript in a lawyer's safe somewhere (I also think it likely that Woodward and Bernstein have already written the final book in their trilogy), I hope there'll be a DVD to accompany it.

Yeah. It's certainly conceivable that they said to Throat, "Look, we'll keep your secret 'til the day you die, like you want. We'll even let you deny it and call us liars and everything…but you have to give us a way of getting our good names back later. So sit for an interview that will let us prove it then, and we'll keep the secret." And whoever Throat was, it's certainly possible that he'd want some sort of statement out there to explain why he did what he did. So…yeah, there could be a tape. And a book. And a CD. And you've got to figure in the movie rights and a video game and the Deep Throat theme park where you get to meet Hal Holbrook in a garage…

We're about to get the first CD release of the score for the 1966 revue based on guess-what-magazine. Longtime MAD scribes Larry Siegel and Stan Hart did the book, with music by Mary Rodgers and lyrics by a couple of folks, one of whom turned out to be Stephen Sondheim. You can read more about it here and order the new CD here. I've never seen a production of the show, which had an amazingly sparse afterlife. You'd think a small musical with such name recognition would be snapped up by little theater groups and college troupes…but nope.

Rumor has it that it only ran as long as it did in New York because MAD publisher Bill Gaines had made a bet with a friend that the show would play for two years…so when it seemed primed to close before that, he waived royalties and even kicked in cash to keep it open at a loss. I do have the album, which I enjoyed, but it's always nice to have these things on CD.

My pal Kim "Howard" Johnson is the world's foremost authority on Monty Python and the author of several books on the subject. I hope he knows about something else because he's a contestant this week on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? His run, however long it lasts, starts on Tuesday and concludes on Wednesday. I have a feeling it's going to go like this…

"Is that your final answer?"

"I told you once."

"No, you didn't."

"I most certainly did…"

…and so on. His segments were taped some time ago but he hasn't told me how he did, so I'll be tuning in to see if he's buying, next time we have dinner.

This is a solid recommendation of a new DVD that's due out in late March. There are many people in this world who imitate Groucho Marx and usually, it doesn't go much beyond walking like their tie's caught in their fly, plus they mime a cigar and wiggle eyebrows that look like they have friction tape on them. An amazing exception is Frank Ferrante, who's been criss-crossing America for many years now, usually with one of two Groucho shows. Groucho: A Life in Revue is a small play written by Arthur Marx (Groucho's son) and Bob Fisher. It's quite funny, though sad near the end, and you may have seen it years ago, in person or on Showtime, with Gabe Kaplan. Marx and Fisher have revamped it a few times, and the version taped for PBS, starring Ferrante, is even better.

This is what's finally coming out on DVD and you can pre-order it here. I suggest you do.

At other times, Ferrante appears in An Evening With Groucho, which is an even smaller play (just him and a piano player) which has yet to be recorded for PBS or DVD or any kind of commercial release, as far as I know. If you want to see it, you'll have to go see him live — as I did, a few years ago. Over on his website, he has a list of where he'll be Grouchoing, and it really is a must-see performance. I've never seen an impersonator climb so totally inside the guy he's doing. He even ad-libs up to Groucho standards.

This post was inspired by this one over on Gary Sassaman's weblog. As you'll see, he raves about Frank the way I rave about Frank. And if you can't trust two Marx Brothers freaks, who can you trust?

There are now a number of different formats but years ago, most Sunday comic strips could be printed two ways — two-tier or full. Charles Schulz, for example, would draw Peanuts as a three-tier strip, meaning three rows of panels…but he'd write it so that the top row could be discarded, and the strip would still make sense. This gave a newspaper the flexibility to run it in a smaller space if that's all they had.

We are all buying the new Complete Peanuts series from Fantagraphics that reprints Mr. Schulz's magnum opus from Day One. They strive to print all the Sunday pages in complete form but as we all noted, one strip in Volume Two was incomplete. The editors could only locate a truncated, two-tier copy of it, which they ran with a promise to keep searching. If, they said, they managed to locate the complete strip — it's the one for 5/3/53 — they would print it in some future volume.

Well, a copy has been found…not a great one but a fuzzy image off microfilm is better than nothing. It will be cleaned up and included, probably not in the next release but in the one after.

I agree with Tom Spurgeon's comments on the case of Gordon Lee, a comic book retailer who's in legal trouble over distributing a semi-naughty comic to a minor. Lee made a mistake, but these prosecutions always strike me as an example of our legal system going after people who cannot fight back. I'm glad to see the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund taking on the case.

GSN is four weeks into its new, 13-episode World Series of Blackjack. Each episode, five notable players of the game compete to advance to the final rounds where there will be serious cash awards.

This is tournament play, which is somewhat different from playing the way you and I play in a casino. In tournament play, you're competing against the other players, so it's actually good when you lose a hand, providing the others at the table lose more. There are situations where it might make sense to split tens, double down on high hands…or even double down on a Blackjack. A player has the usual problems of deciding when to hit, stand, split, double or surrender ("surrender" is employed more often than in non-tournament play) but the real strategizing comes with figuring how much to wager. You could easily win every hand but lose the match to someone who lost most of the hands but bet more skillfully.

All thirteen rounds were taped some time ago, and a new one airs every Friday night at 10 PM Eastern time or 7 PM on my satellite dish. GSN has reruns throughout the week but I can't figure out how to tell which one they're airing when, so I just TiVo the Friday night installments. At some point, they'll probably have at least one marathon with all the episodes to date aired in sequence.

I used to play a lot of the common variety of Blackjack but gave it up more than ten years ago. It was fun at first, but it got to feel like work, and if I was going to work, I figured I should work at my writing, which paid a bit more predictably. Even when it was fun, I was less interested in the cash than in the puzzle. Counting cards and figuring progressive wagers tapped a part of my brain that enjoyed the workout, but when that lobe lost interest, I decided to quit while I was ahead. If you play any of those games long enough, you cannot help but lose everything.

Watching tournament play reignites some of that interest, though not to the point where I would ever enter a contest. I'm just having fun watching good players, and occasionally pausing the TiVo before they act to think, "Hmm…what would I do in that situation?" My answers rarely match the decisions of those who go on to win, which is a major reason you'll never catch me trying it. But I play along, armchair style, and then log into two Internet forums for the post-game chatter. Those who competed in the games are contractually barred from discussing an episode until after it airs, but then Anthony Curtis — one of the players and also the publisher of Las Vegas Advisor — does play-by-play on this page, and another player, Ken Smith, posts recaps and analysis on this other forum.

Watching other folks play Blackjack may not interest you. At times, depending on my mood, it doesn't interest me, either. But at times, it rekindles the fun I had for a time playing the basic, me-against-the-dealer version. In a way, it's better because there's no chance of losing money, no cigarette smoke, no idiot players to your right who can't add up a hand with an ace in it, and no pit boss staring at you every time you win a big bet, wondering if you're up to something. Then again, there's no chance of winning money, no cute cocktail waitress bringing me free Sprite, and no way to score a comp to a buffet.

Michael Kinsley teams up with Rob Reiner to explain why the Bush plan for private or personal accounts (whatever they're calling them, this week) cannot work.

After I posted a link to this article about his hardships, several of you wrote to ask what you could do to aid Bill Messner-Loebs. Well, one thing — and this might benefit you as much as it helps him — is to purchase a forthcoming book that he's working on. Aardwolf Publishing is issuing The Three Tenors: Off Key, which is a 100+ page illustrated collection of offbeat tales from Bill Messner-Loebs, Dave Cockrum and Clifford Meth. Go to their site and place an order. Sounds like a goodie.

Do you need to wear a jacket today? Find out here. [Link cribbed from Elayne Riggs, who got it from Lis Riba. Note that it defaults to Boston, where you always have to wear a jacket. But you can enter in the name of your city and find out if you should wear a jacket today when you go out.]

And I see that John Ostrander, who has written some excellent comic books in his day, is now writing an excellent weblog.

Yeah, I know I'm not doing a very good job of not posting here for a while, but I am getting a lot done on that script.

For those of you interested in the Ben-Stein-is-Deep-Throat theory, one reader of this site sent me this link to a long essay on the subject. It makes a better case than I thought possible, but I'm still not convinced. Stein has been pretty vociferous not only that he was not Deep Throat but that he's sure there never was such a person. I can understand why he might deny it was him but not why Deep Throat would say there was no Deep Throat.

One thing that occurs to me is that if it is Stein — and this might apply to a few of the other suspects, as well — there may be a very interesting manuscript locked in some lawyer's safe. Let's say you're Ben Stein and you're also Deep Throat. For your own reasons, you don't want anyone to know of the role you played in the fall of your former boss (and favorite president), Richard M. Nixon. Okay, fine. But you also know that once you die, it's going to come out that you were Deep Throat and I would think you'd want to explain yourself and put the best possible spin on it. A book on the topic would also make a lot of money for your estate. So I kinda hope it is Stein, because if it is, I'll bet he wrote a fascinating book to be published posthumously about why he did it. But I still think it isn't Stein.

The person who sent me this link also notes that Mr. Stein has been ill lately and has cancelled a number of speaking engagements (like this one). The assumption here is that perhaps this ties in with the rumor that Deep Throat is near death. I think I'd rather assume that Stein's illness, whatever it is, is not that severe.

Cartoonist Garry Trudeau, maker of Doonesbury, broke his collarbone while skiing in Aspen on Thursday. Looks like us followers of his strip may be in for a month or two of reruns. Here's a bit more info.

Here is an excellent primer on the new TiVo to Go. I've yet to receive the software upgrade that contains it, but I have the feeling I'm not going to be using it very much, if at all. Much easier to just record shows on my Pioneer DVR with the built-in DVD burner.

I have to keep this brief and get back to work, but I wanted to mention the apparent outrage the other night on ABC's Primetime Live. We've already discussed how 60 Minutes Wednesday on CBS recently missed a big part of the story when they covered Stan Lee. On Thursday night, the ABC show devoted itself to a profile, somewhat approving, of a faith healer in Brazil. In this case, they didn't miss one side of the story…they simply declined to include it. The show interviewed the expert debunker of such things, James Randi, who provided extensive evidence that the guy was a fraud. If they'd used any decent-sized chunk of that footage, they'd have had no story…so Randi was limited to around twelve seconds. Radio strongman Paul Harris is all over this story…and even if you don't care about religious/medical con artists (or even if you believe), you might want to listen to his interview with Randi. It's a terrific example of how the news media hears what they think will sell newspapers or get ratings, and discards whatever gets in the way of those goals.