The late Frank Kelly Freas is remembered in a way that would have amused him. (Thanks, Jerry Beck.)

David Kay was the author of a number of articles and speeches about the Iraq War that told everyone what had gone wrong, and in such eloquent and calmly reasoned manner that few seemed able to attack or answer him back. He has a new article out about what may be about to go wrong with Iran.

I awoke this morn to this e-mail from Michael Burstein…

Given the news that Deep Throat is terminally ill, your post saying that "I really hope it turns out to be someone like Julie Nixon Eisenhower or Ben Stein" could be interpreted as hoping one of them is about to die, which I'm pretty sure is not the impression you meant to give…

No, you're right. I don't hope for anyone's death…especially Ben Stein, since the world needs all the funny Conservatives it can get.

But you know, I kinda wonder about this rumor that D.T. is very ill. Why would Woodward, who has zealously avoided giving anything but the slightest hint for decades, now reveal to anyone that it's someone who is now terminally ill? If the source is one of the two dozen or so popular suspects, there are going to be reporters on his porch, demanding to know if he's dying so they can rush back and say, "So-and-so is dying so he must be Deep Throat." That's probably not what the mystery man wants to endure in his final days of life. And there's nothing in it for Woodward, especially if his source continues to deny it on his death bed. You have to wonder if this is just another false lead.

We may be about to find out the identity of "Deep Throat," the informant who tipped off Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein to certain facts during the Nixon/Watergate drama. According to this article, D.T. is ill to the point where Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee has already prepped the obit, which would presumably reveal the secret. Todd Draper, a reader of this site, notes: "This would seem to contradict the George H. W. Bush theory, as he seemed perfectly healthy during his Super Bowl pre-game appearance tonight."

So it could be any day now, or this report could be wrong. If I were a betting man, and there were anyone around willing to cover bets on this, I think I'd lay a few bucks on it being former FBI assistant director Mark Felt, and maybe make a side wager on Fred Fielding, who was Nixon's deputy counsel, just in case. Of course, I really hope it turns out to be someone like Julie Nixon Eisenhower or Ben Stein, but I'll settle for just about anyone at this point.

Earlier today, I linked to an excerpt from a song and challenged you to guess what was familiar about the tune. Most of you probably got it, but for the benefit of those who didn't…

That was an excerpt from a song called "It's Really Love," which appeared on Annette Funicello's 1959 LP record, Annette Sings. It was written for her by Paul Anka, who was recycling a song he'd written years earlier called "Toot Sweet.

In 1962, shortly before Johnny Carson took over as host of The Tonight Show, he and his manager ran into Anka on 57th Street in New York. During a brief conversation, Carson happened to mention that he was looking for a theme song. Anka scurried off to come up with something and decided to reuse the tune one more time. He was doing work then at Bell Sound Studios and he put together a demo record there and shipped it off to Johnny, who by then was down in Florida for a combination vacation and strategy session. Carson heard the song and liked it, but ran into some opposition from his newly-chosen bandleader, Skitch Henderson. Apparently, Skitch was looking forward to writing a theme song and collecting the royalties every time it was played.

There are two versions of what happened next, depending on who you ask. One version is that Johnny insisted on Anka's song and, out of gratitude, Anka named it "Johnny's Song" and put Carson down as co-author, which meant that they split the royalties. The other version is the opposite: Anka named it that and designated Johnny as co-author so that Johnny would insist on that theme. Either way, it wound up being played to kick off every The Tonight Show for 30+ years. For each of those years, Anka and Carson split somewhere in the neighborhood of $200,000. Not bad.

Didn't watch.

If you're sick of all that movement in your cartoon shows, have we got a DVD for you! In fact, we have two sets of them. Scheduled for release in late March are two DVD collections that, between them, will give you every damn episode of Clutch Cargo, plus a whole batch of extras and bonuses. Of special interest will be the features on the making of the syndicated 1959 "animated" series…and you'll notice that I put that word in quotes because, mouth action aside, these things moved about as much as the Breidamerkurjokull Glacier.

But hey, they had clever scripts and terrific graphic design and good voice work, and the weird "Synchro-Vox" process by which the lips of human actors were superimposed on the faces of the characters for dialogue purposes. That was just creepy enough to hold my interest when I was seven, and Sheriff John was showing these between Bosco commercials on Channel 11. Since the DVD sets are an incredible bargain (each set has eight or nine hours on three discs for under eleven bucks), I'm going to advance-order them here and here. You might want to do the same. That is, unless you're the kind of snob who expects animated characters to actually be animated.

Thank you for all the suggestions of e-mail programs, most of which are Eudora Pro or Mozilla Thunderbird. I appreciate the quick response.

This is for a friend. He's looking for a simple PC E-Mail program that does two things. One, which most of them do, is to enable him to filter incoming mail and send different messages to different folders. The other, which I've never heard of, is a feature whereby a message is somehow marked or flagged once he writes a reply to it.

My e-mail program of choice is Forte Agent, and it's quite wonderful, especially in its handling of newsgroups. But I can't see that it does what my friend wants, which is to be able to look at a message he's received and say, "Oh, good. I already answered this." Does any program do this?

I usually wouldn't be found reading, let alone linking to a sports blog. But my friend Bruce Reznick called my attention to this post on one. It's by a comedian named Scott Long, describing his experiences last year doing a corporate gig during Super Bowl week and I found it interesting.

You'll need to be able to listen to MP3 files to play along. Here's a brief excerpt from a song that Annette Funicello recorded back when people were letting Annette Funicello make records. Does this song sound familiar to you? Where else might you have heard it? Answer later today…

Michael Jackson must be in trouble. He has Geraldo Rivera on his side.

Rivera was a guest the other night with Leno, plugging his weekend exclusive interview with The King of Pop and telling us that Michael is innocent and will be proven so in a court of law. He actually had a nice, civil debate with Jay…almost the kind of thing you wish would occur on shows like Crossfire or Hannity and Colmes, and I guess it's what prompted me to TiVo and watch At Large With Geraldo Rivera yesterday afternoon. Can you say, "Big waste of time"? The singer was under a gag order that limited what he could say, so it was mostly him repeating how much his family loves him and Rivera courting the interviewee's favor by saying over and over how unfair the accusations are.

The closest thing to news in the whole tawdry hour was that Michael said, as I believe he also did in a video on his website, that he will never again place himself in a position where he can get into the kind of mess he's in. Geraldo later informed us — in an attempt to claim a scoop where none seemed to exist — that this was an announcement from Jackson that he will never again invite children to his Neverland Ranch. Well, maybe it was…but it would have been nice if Rivera had explained whether this was just something he assumed Michael was trying to say, or if Jackson or some spokesperson told him that was what it meant.

I'm annoyed that I let myself get roped into watching this. I more or less vowed not to follow this trial (see here), in part because I don't see it leading to an actual resolution. Either he'll be found guilty and there will be the strong suggestion that he was railroaded because of his celebrity, or he'll be found not guilty and there will be the strong suggestion that he did it but bought his way out with a high-priced legal team. Or I suppose there's a third possibility, which is some sort of plea bargain and settlement, though that looks unlikely. No matter what, the outcome will raise more questions than it settles.

The one thing I got out of the Geraldo interview was a sense that Jackson still doesn't believe that he brought most of this on himself. That's even if he didn't actually molest the kid in question…and I'm willing to believe that's at least possible. But when you pay off one molestation claim to the tune of (reportedly) 20 million bucks and then go on TV and talk about the joys of letting small children share your bed…well, you shouldn't be in shock that folks think you're a pedophile.

For decades now, Jackson has had absolute control of his immediate world, which is peopled with those who tell him exactly what he wants to hear. This was especially true when he was cranking out those million-selling albums that made everyone around him very wealthy. Now, he's not quite the cash-yielding ATM he once was, and events are forcing him to more and more confront the judgments of those who aren't on his payroll. I guess it's a little hard to adjust.

Geraldo's insistence on Jackson's innocence seems to be based in large part on his conclusion that the parents of the allegedly-molested boy are looking for a big payoff. They went, he told us several times, to a civil lawyer — the same one who wrangled the $20 million check — before they even went to the police. As proof, I don't find that too definitive. Among other possible interpretations, the boy could have been violated and the parents could have uncorked champagne and yelled, "Whoopee! Our ship has come in!"

If I were going to follow this case — and I'm not, after I finish writing this — I'd like to hear some actual rebuttal of charges. In any case, I'm glad someone's taking Michael's side, though I'm not sure Geraldo isn't helping him the way you help a drowning man by throwing him an anchor. For one thing, it doesn't do him a lot of good to have his only interview broadcast with the words "AT LARGE" supered over his image.

Still, Rivera delivered a good speech about not judging people without hearing all the evidence. I thought that was nice. And it would have been even nicer if he'd felt that way back when his broadcasts were airing every bit of dirt anyone could find on Gary Condit.

Michael Kinsley has been thinking about what George W. Bush is thinking about.

My buddy Mike Peters made me laugh out loud with this installment of his fabbo newspaper strip, Mother Goose & Grimm. Browse his whole site by going here, and don't miss his latest editorial cartoons.

No one has yet sent me a list of what's on Volume III of the Garfield and Friends DVD series. But they've sent it to this site.

Somewhere in there, you'll see an episode called "Mistakes Will Happen." If you're ever writing a show like this and you want to really go over budget and create all sorts of production problems, trying doing a cartoon where you deliberately insert drawing and animation errors. We actually had to have things done over because they'd done them right.