This morning, President Obama on Friday outlined changes he was recommending for the National Security Agency regarding its phone records collection program and its surveillance practices with regard to foreign leaders. Will these changes be sufficient? Two of my favorite political writers disagree. Kevin Drum says no, they're weak tea. Fred Kaplan thinks the tea is somewhat stronger. I'd give my opinion but, you know, we are being monitored…

Great covers of the sixties on the National Enquirer.

Johnny Carson performs a monologue on an old Steve Allen Show. His opening joke is one that he used often when he was on The Tonight Show…

Our pal Robert Elisberg visited the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and wrote a long report on what he saw there. I want a couple of those things.

A few folks have written me to suggest a reason why those two local L.A. stations might want to broadcast the exact same coverage of what they're now calling the Colby Fire. TV stations are required to air a certain number of hours per year of non-commercial, community service programming. This news coverage qualifies for it. So it's kind of a way of slaying two fowls with one rock…

The fire, which they're saying was caused by an illegal campfire is 30-40% contained as I write this and three folks who made that campfire are in custody. Watching the news reminds you how horrible it is that human beings have to have these tragedies in their lives…but how heroic and brave the responders are. We need to appreciate those people more.

I'm afraid I have no decent anecdotes about Dave Madden or Russell Johnson, both of whom have just died. Madden was out of the cast of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In by the time I started poaching on the set of that show. In fact, he was co-starring on The Partridge Family, a show of which I was never too fond. The few times I did watch, I thought he was the best thing about it but the kids got all the screen time.

But I always thought he was funny…just naturally funny. In 1985, I cast him to do a voice on a CBS Storybreak and he sure made my words sound better than they were. He was funny. He was professional. And he was Dave Madden. Nobody was ever better at that kind of dry delivery. I wish I had more to tell you about him but that's about it.

I'm not sure whether we should feel sorry, career-wise, for Russell Johnson. I read this in one of his obits today…

He admitted he had trouble finding work after Gilligan's Island, having become typecast as the egg-headed professor. But he harbored no resentment for the show, and in later years he and other cast members, including Bob Denver, who had played the bumbling first mate Gilligan, often appeared together at fan conventions.

You can look at this two ways. One is that the three-season sitcom — which has rerun indefinitely, probably paying close-to-bupkis to its stars — lessened his opportunities for other work. Or you can say that it gave him a signature role, one that made him famous. Today as folks are saying, "The Professor from Gilligan's Island died," everyone knows who that is. The kind of roles he got before and after that series didn't do that for him. When I've seen him at conventions and autograph shows, he usually has a long line of folks who want to buy his pic and signature. They're not there because he was on a couple episodes of Death Valley Days.

I only met him once briefly at one of those. He was an awfully nice, friendly guy not just to me but to everyone. He sat patiently next to Mary Ann and answered all the same questions for eighty-millionth time. Elsewhere in the room, there were actors with no customers for their signed photos. Some of them were fine actors who'd played hundreds of roles on TV shows…but they never managed to snag that regular part on a popular series. I hope Russell Johnson looked around that room and decided he was a successful man.

There's an awful fire raging up in the Glendora area…homes being lost, homeowners being evacuated, etc. That's far from me and I don't think I know anyone who's threatened but I'm still watching the news coverage with great concern. Almost all the local channels have news crews up there…and this is the kind of thing they're usually quite good at covering. I'm flipping from station to station and I see them giving out useful information and I haven't seen any instances of two things I always hate when this kind of thing happens. One is reporters trying to drag firefighters and officials away from their duties to talk on television. Yeah, like these people don't have anything better to do. My other gripe is when they shove a camera in the face of someone who just lost their home, or is scurrying to evacuate, and ask, "How do you feel?"

This may be a trivial matter but I'm curious. Channel 2 (KCBS) and Channel 9 (KCAL) in Los Angeles have the same owners and long ago consolidated their news organizations. The news broadcasts on both stations come from the same newsroom and the same reporters. Right now, those two channels are running the exact same feed. Channel 2 is preempting The Price is Right to bring us their coverage and Channel 9 is preempting America's Court with Judge Ross to bring us the exact same coverage. I'm wondering if anyone there said, "Hey, let's put The Price is Right on for people who want to watch that, and we'll super a little message on the screen that says 'Fire in Glendora, Details on KCAL 9.'"

No one would be deprived of news coverage they need/want to see. I mean, even if you weren't satisfied with pretty much the same reporting on Channel 4, Channel 5, Channel 7 and Channel 11, if you had to watch the fire as covered by the KCBS/KCAL news team, why do you need it on two channels? There's got to be someone who'd rather watch The Price is Right…

I have friends — or maybe acquaintances would be a better term for most of them — who insist to me that scientists are divided on the subject of Global Warming and Climate Change. No, they're not.

This is the opening to The Huckleberry Hound Show as it aired in Brazil. Dom Pixote — that's what he was called down there — was sponsored by Trol, a Brazilian toy company, and they had some local cartoon studio animate (not very well) an opening for the program with many plugs for their brand. But I kinda like the translated theme song sung in Portuguese…

This cold has me serializing my sleep. I sleep. I get up to cough. I sleep. I get up to cough. Usually, I need about five hours a night and I think I may have gotten that in bits 'n' pieces since I first went to bed last night. The rare times I get sick are the only times I can go to bed without the feeling that I've reached a good stopping point in my writing — finishing a script or a key scene or just plain gotten something done, even if I start the next workday by tossing it and rewriting. If I go to bed and I haven't finished something, I generally lie there wide awake, mentally writing what I should have finished before turning in…and I get up, shuffle back to the computer and put it down. There are advantages to working at home.

Lots of nice e-mails this AM from folks who tuned in Stu's Show. One of the things I love about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World is exemplified by the fact that Stu, Mike Schlesinger and I could spend three hours and fifteen minutes talking about it and barely scratch the veneer. There's just so much that's fascinating about that film — all the fine performances, the amazing stunt work, the technical expertise of those who made it, the locations, the special effects, etc. As I said on the show, I fear that in the Commentary Track, we may have dwelled overmuch on the mistakes…like Mickey Rooney wearing a headset in one shot and not in the next. But every movie has those and it's impressive how few there were in a film that was so involved, so complicated.

I think I should also say how impressed I've always been with the Criterion company. I have a lot of their DVDs (and before that, Laserdiscs) and I never bought one that I thought wasn't as diligently-assembled as was humanly possible. They always do the best transfers of the material and have the best special features. Working with them on this one, I witnessed the attention-to-detail I knew was inbred into the company.

They were also classy enough to actually send me advance copies of the finished product. I've probably done interviews or tracks or otherwise helped out on two dozen DVDs — sometimes paid, sometimes not. And I could guess that with less than half of them, the makers of the DVD honored their promises to send me copies of the thing when it came out. It is too often a case of once they get what they want out of you, they forget you. At least twice when someone at Time-Warner Home Video called and asked me to help out on a DVD, I had to say to them, "I won't talk to you about this until you send me copies of the last DVD I helped you folks with." Somehow, it's more annoying when they don't send you the $29.95 DVD than when they forget to send you a check for a lot more money.

Turning to other matters: I put up a video the other day about a blind gent on the street getting a helping hand from a passer-by. This video has been much seen on the 'net and apparently, a number of people find something a little (or a lot) offensive about it. Considering it from their viewpoint, I'm not inclined to disagree. This article was posted on a blog called "Bad Cripple" and I think the person overreacts but does make a valid case. I thought it was a nice bit of filmmaking but if I thought about it this way at the time, I might not have linked to it.

Saving Mr. Banks was the surprise non-nominee in this morning's Oscar nominations. It got one for "Original Score" and I think that was it. Everyone thought Emma Thompson was a shoo-in for Best Actress and maybe Tom Hanks or Paul Giamatti for Best Supporting Actor but everyone who thought that was wrong. I don't think that says anything about Hollywood finding the film dishonest or biased. I don't think the Academy ever speaks with one mindset or voice on things like that. I think folks just found other films and other actors more impressive. Always be wary when you hear someone say something like, "Well, they nominated Bruce Dern because they think he was unfairly overlooked for Black Sunday back in 1977." There is absolutely no data on this, no polls, no spokespersons speaking on behalf of the voters, no evidence at all. I was going to write it's like someone trying to tell you what your cat is thinking but in that case, the person at least would know you have one cat and maybe what color or sex it is. Those who try to say why Academy voters voted a certain way don't even know who those voters were or how many voted that way.

Hmm…I seem to have stopped coughing. The healing powers of blogging. More later.

I'm getting over a cold that I think was brought on by staying up all night a few consecutive nights finishing a script. If you tuned in Stu's Show today, you heard me coughing now and then.

And if you tuned in and stuck with us the entire time, you heard Mike Schlesinger and me discuss It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World for — this is the exact timing — 3 hours, 15 minutes and 24 seconds. When the movie debuted, it was three hours and twenty-one minutes. If you missed it, you can download it from the Stu's Show Archives which you can find at the program's website for a measly 99 cents. While you're there, take advantage of the bargain rate and download four past Stu's Show episodes for the price of three. I'd recommend the ones with Dick Van Dyke, Jonathan Winters and Shelley Berman…among many, many other good ones.

I would write more but I'm too tired. See you tomorrow.

Just watch this…

Meryl Streep made some news at the National Board of Review dinner held last Thursday. She blasted Walt Disney for sexism and support of anti-Semite groups. I'm not quite sure where some of the "facts" come from when people say such things but they rarely seem to come from anyone who actually knew and worked with Walt for any amount of time. The case that he treated women badly seems to hinge on a 1938 letter that said women couldn't be animators. In the context of the time, that was not an unreasonable view and anyway, it was 1938. Disney hired plenty of women in important positions after that.

I've probably over the years heard Walt discussed by two dozen people who spent a lot of time with him. I've heard zero tales of sexism or anti-Semitism. Our friend Floyd Norman, who was the first black animator at the studio, thinks Ms. Streep wasn't talking about the Walt Disney he knew and worked for.

Stu Shostak's show this week celebrates the release (next week) of Criterion's new deluxe DVD/Blu-ray set of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Criterion is the real class act of the home video market, offering the best prints and the best special features. You can order a copy here.

Stanley Kramer's epic comedy was released on November 7, 1963. At that point, it was 201 minutes long — that's counting the film, the overture, the intermission music and some recorded police calls that played during intermission, and the exit music. This was what was called a "Road Show" release. The movie was shown on a reserved seat basis at a few selected theaters in big cities and projected via a new kind of Cinerama. Previously, the wide screen of Cinerama was achieved by splitting the image into thirds and projecting it via three projectors, kept theoretically in sync. It was complicated and often resulted in visible seams in the image.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World was the first film released in a new process that achieved Cinerama dimensions with one projector. The screen was big but the movie was long. A few weeks later — while still in its Road Show engagements — it was trimmed to 162 minutes. Later, when the film moved on to regular, non-Cinerama theaters, things like the overture and exit music were jettisoned and the movie ran around 154 minutes. That's the version that has been available on TV and home video for decades.

The new Criterion product contains two versions of the movie — the best-possible transfer of the General Release version and a "restored" version which puts back most but not all of the trims and scenes that were omitted when the film was cut. At 197 minutes, it's almost the same version that opened on 11/7/63 but a few of the restored scenes have video but no audio…or audio but no video. The video in the restored scenes is not quite as good but they are very watchable.

The longer version can be watched with or without the Commentary Track in which three Mad World experts discuss the making of the film, the performers in it, the performers not in it, where the location scenes were shot, etc. The three experts are former Sony Pictures VP Michael Schlesinger, Video Master (and Mad World authority) Paul Scrabo…and me. On Wednesday's Stu's Show, Mike and I will be spending 2-3 hours discussing the film, telling you trivia that didn't get into the Commentary Track, discussing the impact of the movie and so forth. If you're interested in this movie, you won't want to miss it.

There are two ways to listen to Stu's Show. One is to listen live. Go to the Stu's Show website during the show when we do it live and you can listen for free. It starts at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is 7 PM Eastern and other times in other time zones. It will run at least two hours and probably much longer.

After we do it, it will appear in the Stu's Show Archives at the same web address. There, you'll be able to download it for 99 cents — or get four shows for the price of three. There are plenty of great past episodes of Stu's Show there that you'll enjoy. (He's even had on a number of the cast members from Mad World like Jonathan Winters, Carl Reiner, Stan Freberg and Marvin Kaplan.)

So that's my plug — for the Criterion set and for Stu's Show. Buy. Tune in. Enjoy. You may even hear Uncle Herman's odd theory about French Toast.

Clydene Nee could use a hand. Clydene is a charming lady who was a colorist of comic books when I met her but has more recently been the person in charge of coordinating Artists Alley at the Comic-Con International. That is a very demanding position of responsibility and she does it very, very well. If you know her, or even if you've just enjoyed hanging around that part of the con, you might want to donate some bucks to help her with horrendous medical bills. That's what a lot of her friends are doing. Her enemies would help out too but she doesn't have any. Not one.