The State of the Union address seemed fine to me. If you hate the guy who delivered it, you can quibble with every comma but it seemed very reasonable and non-confrontational to me. My friend Roger described it in an e-mail as Obama declaring war on Congress and vowing to use executive orders to enact his agenda without their consent. But the only such actions I heard him announce was that he would raise the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 per hour, and enact this new kind of savings accounts for retirees — a plan which many Republicans have backed. Everything else being categorized today as tyranny was to either continue an existing program, some of which were started under Bush, or enact some studies of different problems.

On Facebook, a few right-wing "friends" of mine sent me a graphic that condemned Obama for reading his speech off a TelePrompter. Yeah, like every president before him — and everyone doing a rebuttal to him — didn't use a TelePrompter of some sort. Some of these people might just as well be screaming we need to impeach the guy because he was wearing a necktie.

I tweeted the other day, "If you need to kill a few hours, just go to your bank and tell them you need a cashier's check in Euros." In truth, it took about forty minutes but why should that take forty minutes? I got a teller who looked at me like I was asking her to turn Crystal Geyser water into Manischewitz wine. When I assured her that it could be done, she wandered off to find some other employee who knew how to do it. Turned out, there were none…but the Assistant Manager said, "I'll handle this." He then spent the next half-hour or so on the phone to other divisions of the bank, locating someone who could teach him.

Finally, he figured it out. The amount I needed the check to be in Euros turned out to be about $24 in American money…and there was a $30 fee for issuing the check. Somehow, the fee would have felt more unreasonable if it had taken them two minutes to issue me the check, as opposed to forty.

Lastly for now, folks keep writing to ask if I'm still feeding feral cats in my backyard. Yes, two of them: Lydia and Sylvia, both of whom have been around for years. You may remember how in 2008, I spent many days and nights trying to trap an animal I called The Kitten…a stray who seemed pregnant and, at the very least, in need of being fixed. (The tale started here and continued through many subsequent postings.) That was Lydia and she still spends most evenings in my yard and sometimes appears during the day. She's learned to trust me but Sylvia, after as many years, still acts like I'm just putting out all those bowls of food to fatten her up for a Cat Pot Pie I intend to make someday. Next time I see the two of them together, I'll try to snap a current photo and post it here…along with a good recipe for Cat Pot Pie.

Today (Wednesday), the topic on Stu's Show is The Mary Tyler Moore Show.  Your genial host Stu Shostak welcomes author-historian Vince Waldron for a lively discussion of one of the most popular situation comedies of all time.  It was one of those shows that changed television forever and Stu and Vince will discuss why that was.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes top three.

Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.

Here's two more of these. As I explained here, these are songs that Mel Blanc recorded in, I would guess, the mid-to-late fifties. He did one song for each month, wishing kids born in that month a Happy Birthday…all except for April, which is Ollie Owl (not your most famous Warner Brothers character) which was sung by someone else. Who is it? Beats me. The backup vocals are credited to the Sandpiper Chorus and Orchestra and my thought is that it was one of those folks.

But this does get me to wondering and maybe someone reading this (i.e., Greg Ehrbar) can clear something up. I'm familiar with the Sandpipers, a group consisting of Mike Stewart, Ralph Nyland, Dick Byron and Bob Miller. We wrote about them here and here and here.

Now, I always heard these Happy Birthday songs were recorded for Capitol Records and wound up being released instead by Golden Records…but I also thought Capitol and Mel Blanc recorded in Hollywood, so why is Mel being backed by a New York-based group? Also, the chorus on all of these seems to include one or two female voices…so is that the same four male Sandpipers plus friends? Anyone?

Here are Daffy and Ollie. The Daffy tune is especially good…

Another interview with Jay Leno.

There are a lot of articles around about his departure from The Tonight Show and many of them seem to me to be missing an important point. Yeah, I think Jay would have liked to have stayed on indefinitely but I think he's okay with leaving. Somehow, this is getting translated into either, "He's upset about leaving" or "He thinks it's a great idea to leave now." Speaking for myself, I've never felt either way about a job I enjoyed and did for any significant length of time.

In this world, there are folks who think of a job as one place where you try to work until the day you're ready for retirement. And then there are those of us who go from job to job our whole lives, sometimes juggling several at a time, treating each one just as something they're doing for a while. I'm in the latter group: I've been a freelancer since 1969. I've never worked for one publisher or producer at a time, nor have I ever worked on anything that I felt I'd be doing for more than a few years…or in many cases, a few months. If I get hired to write a TV show or a comic book or a movie script or anything, it's just what I'm doing at the moment.

I have friends in the first category who can't understand how a person could live like that. Their lives seem to require the order and security that comes from an occupation where you can describe what you do in a simple sentence: "I do [job description] for [name of employer]" and they can expect that, apart from promotions, that sentence won't change in five or ten years. I have one acquaintance from high school who worked for the phone company from age 18 until he retired and to him, I'm just a guy who can't hold a job.

Leno is at heart a stand-up comic. It's about as "freelance" an occupation as exists in the world today. Even when you work the same club over and over, you go in, tell your jokes and leave. No office. No sense of being part of a staff. Jay got that from doing The Tonight Show but he never even did that exclusively, playing two or three stand-up appearances per week. He has a stand-up date the day after he does his last Tonight Show. I'm sure he'll miss the nightly gig but he's not losing his career or something he expected to last forever. And I suspect he doesn't need the money.

Frank Rich does not believe Fox News really has the power to effect change in this country; that its only power now is its ability to piss off Liberals. I kinda agree with that but I think it's also good at giving Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert a target to shoot at, and at selling walkers and reverse mortgages.

I assume most of you watch The Daily Show but just in case you don't…

Conservative Maggie Gallagher says that Republicans should stop using the term "job creator" because it reminds people of their bosses.

I think they should stop using it because it's kind of a fake term. What they mean is "rich person" but they don't want to say "rich person" so they say "job creator." But a lot of rich people — maybe even the overwhelming majority — don't create jobs except the way a lot of middle-class people do — hiring a gardener or a housekeeper once a week or something like that. Dana Milbank explained all about this here.

We always seem to have one of those "voodoo economics" explanations of why the poor will benefit if the rich pay little or no taxes. It used to be the "trickle down" theory but when we slashed taxes for the wealthy, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. That theory has failed so totally that they came up with the "job creator" one: If we slash taxes for the wealthy, they'll create more jobs. When this one fails a little more, it'll be replaced by another one. Hey, you know if we eliminate taxes for the wealthiest Americans, they'll all start handing out hundred dollar bills to poor people?

One reason Peter Sellers wasn't in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was that he wanted the same kind of money he'd been receiving for being the sole star of the movie and if they'd paid him that, they would have had to pay the same thing to Milton Berle, Buddy Hackett, Mickey Rooney, etc. So they got Terry-Thomas instead.

Another reason was that Mr. Sellers had another movie to begin shooting…a pretty good comedy which came out fifty years ago tomorrow. It was Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. According to Eric Schlosser, a lot more of that film was true than some of us might imagine.

Not long after John F. Kennedy was assassinated, my parents took me out to the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium to hear an evening of folk singers. The main event was Pete Seeger and what I recall is that he sang for a very long time and we all loved him. There were speeches, by him and others, about not letting the murder of J.F.K. kill our hopes and idealism…but the songs were much more eloquent. It was a very exciting evening.

Flash forward to the evening before the first inauguration of Barack Obama. There on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Seeger and Bruce Springsteen overwhelmed the audience — there and all over the world — with a passionate rendition of "This Land is Your Land." And I had to think…

Seeger spent his life singing and preaching about making America a better place. Often, he was denounced as a commie or worse for his messages, few of which seem all that radical today. What would he have thought that evening back at the Santa Monica Civic if someone had said to him, "You'll live long enough to sing that last song on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as America inaugurates a black man as President of the United States"?

He just died at the age of 94. He saw an awful lot of his dreams come true.

I just caught an episode of Pawn Stars — a relatively new episode, I think. It's called "I'll Be Doggone."

In it, a lady brought in a copy of the 1958 Peanuts paperback called Snoopy, containing what was purported to be an original sketch of Lucy by Charles Schulz. Chumlee, of the pawn shop's staff, called in an expert to verify that the sketch and signature were legit. The expert came in, said they were…and Chumlee bought the book from the seller for $1400. Presumably, if this was a legit transaction and not just one staged for the cameras, the book then went on sale in the shop for well over that amount.

Now, I'm always hesitant to say a drawing is real or fake unless I hold the actual drawing in my hands. So I won't go any farther than to say that on my set, it sure looked phony.

There are a lot of articles and Internet posts around that seem pretty certain Woody Allen was a child molester…or worse. If you read and believed any of them, you oughta read Robert B. Weide as he makes a very calm, reasoned case for Allen's innocence.

I don't know what to think and I'm somewhat reticent to convict someone (or condemn an accuser) based on a "trial" via Internet postings. But Wiede does put forth a pretty strong argument that there's a lot more to this story than most of the articles admit, and that there are a lot of outright untruths around.

• If you need to kill a few hours, just go to your bank and tell them you need a cashier's check in Euros.

Here are some of the cutest creatures on Earth — even if not one of them is a baby panda or me…

Lots of messages about Leno, all from folks I'm not sure want their names used so I won't. This one's from a friend in the TV business…

What if the Jimmy Fallon show is getting a .5 rating six months in, and NBC goes back to Leno and says they'll double his paycheck he'll do the show one more time? Did anybody ask him that? (I'm not saying that Jay is planning it.)

If they'd asked Jay that, he would have given the most diplomatic answer — that's not going to happen — but it's also probably the true one. This isn't like last time when Jay was still up and running with his 10 PM show. He had a studio, offices, a full staff, etc. Going back to The Tonight Show was just a matter of bringing in a new desk, booking more guests and changing the name on the studio doors. A pal of mine there then said that if they'd called Jay at 3:00 in the afternoon and said, "Hey, instead of taping The Jay Leno Show in an hour, make it an episode of The Tonight Show," they could have pulled it off.

This time, Jay's whole infrastructure there is being dismantled. There'll be no studio, no offices, no staff, etc. The Tonight Show is moving to New York, remember. Jay would have to start from scratch. NBC couldn't just pop him back into the slot while they looked around for the young guy they think can do the show for the next decade or two. If Fallon bombs to the point where they can't keep him on — which I also don't think will happen — they'll have to go out and find that next fellow in a hurry. (Also, it'll be a little harder to get rid of Fallon than it was to get rid of O'Brien. Fallon has Lorne Michaels behind him.)

This message is from a friend who works with Mr. Leno…

You're right. Jay didn't want to go off the air. I'm surprised as you that he's ruling out another late night slot now because he doesn't have to do that. As recently as a few weeks ago, he wasn't ruling that out. He was just chuckling and saying, "I'm not going to think about that now." Apparently, he has thought about it. It has me wondering if he has a new gig but it doesn't exactly fall under the definition of competing with the other guys in late night.

Maybe. Or maybe Jay's just decided to go out on top and turn into Bob Hope but without the cheesy prime-time specials and the Christmas tours. There really is a void that will need filling soon for Elder Statesperson of Comedy…and it's not like Leno doesn't have plenty to do. He has stand-up dates in Florida the night after he does his last Tonight Show.

That's one of the intriguing things for me about Leno: He's done it a different way from everyone else. He didn't set up a production company to do other shows like Dave and Conan did. He found another source of income. He's kept his stand-up, which he enjoys doing and for which he gets paid a fortune, as a viable avenue. Letterman doesn't seem to have anything else to do in show business once he leaves that show of his. Johnny didn't have anything to do once he left his. Jay's got a job the next night.

Lastly, this is from a fellow comedy writer…

I feel like you do about all the late night shows except that I never saw as much in Craig Ferguson as you once did. Letterman really depresses me. He used to be a guy you tuned in to watch because his show was dangerous and he was constantly doing things that neither he nor anyone had ever done on television before. Now, he seems determined to do exactly the same show, including some of the same monologue jokes, he did the night before. So how long do you think he's going to do it and how well do you think Fallon's going to do?

The answer to how long Dave's going to do it may be answered when we see his numbers without Jay against him. If they go up considerably, he could be there a while. If he finds himself finishing third to two Jimmies…well, he might still stick around as long as they'll let him. I get the feeling Dave's doing that show because he doesn't know what else to do (see above) and he likes having a place to go during the day. He does have a special relationship with Les Moonves there and if not for that, I suspect he would have gotten the tap on the shoulder by now.

One big difference between Jay and Dave is that Jay didn't put NBC in business at 11:35 the way Letterman opened up that time slot for CBS, as well as the one that follows his show. We forget what a desolate wasteland that was before Dave moved in there…and now, no one's assuming there won't be a new talk show there whenever he stops doing his. I kind of assume CBS would like to get a younger guy in there but the affiliates aren't pushing because they recognize that Dave cleared the land. That makes it harder, though not impossible, to kick him off it.

How will Fallon do? I think he'll do well enough for NBC and maybe a little better than that. I don't think his show will beat Leno's numbers but I think NBC is in this for the long haul, and they figure that by 2015 or 2016, Fallon will be equalling or bettering what Jay would have done then if they'd left him on…plus he'll be doing the show for a lot less money. I suspect NBC wasn't prepared for Conan to pull down lower numbers than Jay but they are prepared to cope with that with Fallon. The business has changed a lot in the last few years with regard to late night. It's no longer the major profit center it once was. Now, there's the feeling that if it's ever going to be that again, it's going to require patience and reinvention. If they just wanted to be #1 in the time slot now, they would have left Jay in place until his numbers started to sink.

Speaking of late night: It's after 5 AM and I still have a script to finish before I sleep. More on this tomorrow, assuming I don't sleep through tomorrow.

I'm not plugging a lot of Kickstarters and only ones where the person seeking funds does not ask me. Jackie Estrada did not ask me to plug this one and it's highly worthy of your patronage if you care at all about comic books and the people who make them.

Jackie has been an important figure behind the Comic-Con International for years, not just as the administrator of the Eisner Awards but in many capacities. She is also, as you'll see if you go to her Kickstarter page, a fine photographer. Since darn near everyone important in comics has been to Comic-Con, darn near everyone important in comics has had a pic or two snapped by Jackie Estrada. And now, she's assembling them into a book called Comic Book People.

You'll want a copy of this. Watch the video. Look at the sample photos over on her Kickstarter page. Sign up to back the book at some level that will get you a copy. I can't imagine how you could be even a wee bit sorry. Even if there's a picture of me in it.