The beginnings with The Jackson 5… “Thriller”… the Moonwalk… the 30th Anniversary reunion… the “King of Pop” style, and of course, Bubbles. These are some of my favorite things.

Sadly, Lisa Marie Presley recently wrote He Knew.

One of my favorite sites is Strange New Products which has the latest in offbeat product introductions. I’ve heard that creating a fad is like doing the 100 yard dash on a tightrope. You have to hit ‘em fast and hit ‘em hard. The strangest product introductions are in the gift and candy industries.

The story behind the classic song “Blue Moon” is a long and twisted one.

In 1933, composers Rodgers and Hart were contracted by MGM to score “the screwball comedy to end all screwball comedies,” a film called “The Hollywood Party.” Bombshell sex symbol Jean Harlow was supposed to have played an innocent young girl singing her prayers (“Oh Lord, if you’re not busy up there,/ I ask for help with a prayer…”) but the scene was never shot.

A year later, the tune was renamed “It’s Just That Kind Of Play,” given new lyrics and added to the 1934 Clark Gable film “Manhattan Melodrama,” the film that gangster John Dillinger saw moments before being gunned down near the Biograph Theater in Chicago. But the song was cut from the film before being released and registered for a copyright as an unpublished work.

The studio also wanted a nightclub version of the song so it was re-named “The Bad in Every Man” and given a third set of lyrics. Still, it did not catch on.

Music publisher Jack Robbins convinced Rodgers and Hart to change the lyrics a fourth time, to something more commercial. That’s when they came up with “Blue Moon” and it was made into a hit by Columbia Records’ Connie Boswell in 1935.

The rest, of course, is history. “Blue Moon” has been recorded by countless artists in countless styles, including Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, Django Reinhardt, the Marcels, Bob Dylan and of course, Elvis. (to Linda and Meryl)

Today, June 5 is National Donut Day. So, with the promise of a free donut, I went with anticipation to an unnamed large US donut chainstore.

I went up to the counter and I asked if a coffee roll counted as a free donut on this National Donut Day. The woman told me no, they’re too big. Then I asked if I could have any other donut for free and was told I had to purchase a drink first. I walked out.

A few weeks back, I went to the same donut shop but in a different town. I got one of the last donuts in the shop and later on I discovered that It was small and rock hard. I now understand this donut chain has stopped making fresh donuts altogether. They now merely truck the goods to their various outlets.

I think they should hand out fresh donuts everywhere for free on National Donut Day. Otherwise, what’s the point? Free stale donuts? Or even worse, no free donuts at all? In any case, the best choice is always your local small donut bakery.

If you you watch carefully, you can see me in this old Joe Sedelmaier commercial from the 80s. I’m the guy with the blue suit behind the old man who gets his clothes ripped off. Old friends the Schwartz triplets are in this spot too.

One story I can relate while filming this commercial, was that we were all sitting on the inside of an airline set and each of us got a cup with a wilted piece of celery in it. (After all, it was a satire of a bad airline.) Then Joe chose an old guy to deliver a few lines. The poor guy just couldn’t get it right until the 64th take, two and a half excruciating hours later! Unfortunately, just as the old guy nailed it, the sound person screwed up and with that, Joe angrily swore and stopped shooting the scene right on the spot.

Sedelmaier, a Chicago-based director, is referred to as “the Fellini of America,” populating his ads with oddball characters he picked right off the street. He’s created hundreds of hilarious bits and won countless Clios in spots like Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef,” which became a national craze, Fed Ex’s “Fast Talking Man,” the controversial “Russian Fashion Show” and many more.

Sedelmaier, now retired, is in Ad Age’s “Top 100 People of the Century.” He is currently being saluted at the USA Film Festival, who are debuting Marsie Wallach’s thoroughly entertaining biographical documentary about him, “Point of View.” You can get a 30 minute reel of his work here.

“Originality,” he once said, “is the art of concealing your sources.”

A few weeks back, I was at Tate’s Comics in Fort Lauderdale. I had some bad cabbage so I had to go to the bathroom badly. They let me in and on the inside bathroom door, there was the famous Tommy Toilet poster by cartoonist legend R. Crumb. Only I had never seen it before. I read it from top to bottom again and again, it cracked me up and made my bathroom time that much better.

Philadelphia native Crumb was born in 1943, but he grew up in Delaware and New Jersey. His biggest influence during his youth was his depressed older brother Charles, who co-wrote many of the comics they produced as children. Charles himself was featured in Terry Zwigoff’s hit documentary “Crumb,” although tragically so.

In the beginning, Crumb illustrated cards for American Greetings. Then he took acid and created the wild characters which he was to become known for… Fritz the Cat, Bigfoot, Mr. Natural and Angelfood McSpade, among others. Crumb defined the San Francisco Era in the 60s and 70s with his underground rock posters, as well as covers for Zap Comix, the Weirdo Years and much more. Like many comic artists, including Woody Allen and Harvey Pekar, he’s an afficionado of pre-1930s jazz (he has nearly five thousand 78 records) with his own band called the Cheap Suit Serenaders.

These days, Crumb lives in the south of France with his cartoonist wife Aline, where he has just finished work on a four year project illustrating what is being described as the “biggest story in comics in 2009,″ Crumb’s Book of Genesis. The already controversial comic is excerpted in this week’s The New Yorker.

Beautiful, funny and sad Giulietta Masina is known as “the female Chaplin” because of her natural way of portraying naive characters. She was the wife of fifty years of legendary Italian director Federico Fellini. Fellini and Masina collaborated on two cinema masterpieces, La Strada (1954), the film he called “the complete catalogue of my entire mythological world,” and Nights of Cabiria (1957) which just happens to have my favorite film soundtrack, by maestro Nino Rota.

In case you missed it, the last episode of Late Night with Conan O’Brien recently aired and he showed his all-time favorite clip, the one which he wants to be remembered by.

So sit back and enjoy an ice cold one and watch this good-looking fellow, six foot four, shock of red hair, play some old-time baseball in Conan O’Brien’s 1864 Baseball, where baseballs are “apples,” pitchers are “hurlers” and a new-fangled flying machine is “demonry.” Lots of hilarity and good natured fun.

I had the pleasure of meeting comic Kristen Schaal last Valentines Day on the 13th Floor of the HBO Building in New York. She’s just as charming and delightful and brilliant and funny in person as she is in her screen roles.

Kristen can currently be seen as “Mel” in the HBO hit series Flight of the Conchords and on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart on Comedy Central. She recently won “Best Alternative Comedian” at the HBO US Comedy Arts Festival and is also the winner of the second annual Andy Kaufman Award hosted by the New York Comedy Festival as well as Best Female Stand-up at the 2006 Nightlife Awards in New York.

We also changed the background music from my piano rags to the starry piano jazz of Chicago musician and pal George Goetschel to fit the mood of the posh lounge setting. George has a background in improv, scoring shows for Second City Theater and the ImprovOlympic (io) Theater, where Kristen, George and I share a common background.

If you like the music in this episode, you can get George’s CD “In the Moment.”

Speed Dating is a matchmaking process first introduced in 1998, designed for singles to meet a large number of prospects in a short time. Men and women are rotated to meet each other over a short series of “dates,” usually lasting from three to eight minutes.

A list submitted by each person at the end avoids any immediate rejections, and if the feeling is mutual, the couple hooks up later. It’s become a cultural phenomenon, seen on “Sex and the City,” “Law and Order” and “The Simpsons.” A 2005 study of speed dating events found that most people make their choice within the first three seconds of meeting.

I enjoyed my speed dating experiences, except I felt embarrassment and the pressure to perform, plus none of the sessions led to anything.

It is the bicentennial* of Abraham Lincoln’s birth on Feb. 12. An obscure photo series of Lincoln has recently been found and assembled in an attempt at reconstructing early film-like technology, to give us a stunning moment in time with the legendary president, who was apparently quite light on his feet. Much controversy has been attached to Lincoln, from his questionable ancestry* to the weird and lurid circumstances of his assassination by actor John Wilkes Booth, which has been discovered to have strange coincidences with the JFK assassination.