Comedian Tommy Chong has spent almost three decades
wringing laughs from cigar-sized joints and
smoke-filled vans but now a nine-month jail term has
turned him serious and revitalized his flagging
career.

Promoting his documentary "a/k/a Tommy Chong" at the
Toronto International Film Festival, he hopes the film
will expose what he says is the U.S. government's
heavy-handed dealing with marijuana offenders in the
post-September 11 era.

"The United States is under martial law, it's under
dictatorship," the 67-year-old father of four said in
an interview.

The film chronicles his 2003 arrest and imprisonment
for selling drug paraphernalia online to an undercover
U.S. drug enforcement agent.

The bust was part of a sting operation known as
"Operation Pipe Dreams," which the film likens to a
witch hunt by former U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft following claims that drug trafficking
financed terrorist activities.

The film's producers say the federal government spent
$12 million pursuing Chong and compare that to the $25
million bounty for the capture of Osama bin Laden.

Chong has been an outspoken marijuana advocate since
his days in the Cheech and Chong comedy team, which
rode pot culture to fame in the 1970s with films like
"Up in Smoke" and "Still Smokin."

The documentary suggests the government's motive was
not to rid the Internet of a mail-order pipe-and-bong
business but to send a message about Chong's three
decades of movies and stand-up routines celebrating
marijuana use.

Steve Martin threatens to kill himself!

"If the extraordinary young actress Claire Danes she
doesn't get an Academy Award nomination, I will kill
myself," Martin said in an interview with Reuters.

Danes, 26, plays a Saks Fifth Avenue glove saleswoman
enticed into an affair with a rich man more than twice
her age who gives her everything but love and she
steals the picture.

"Shopgirl," which was shown at the Toronto Film
Festival, is based on a best-selling novella by Steve
Martin, with a screenplay by Steve Martin, who also
produced it and plays the lead male role.

Then, in a flash, he paused to consider just what he
had said and backtracked a bit -- he noted that he
said the same thing about Eddie Murphy who starred
with him in the 1999 comedy "Bowfinger" and he did not
get an Oscar nomination.

Renegade author Hunter S. Thompson lamented the onset
of old age and his physical limits, in an apparent
suicide note published on by Rolling Stone magazine.

The scrawled words, perhaps the last he ever
committed to paper, were written four days before
the self-described "gonzo" journalist shot himself to
death at his secluded home near Aspen, Colorado.

The brief message, scrawled in black marker and titled
"Football Season Is Over" (an apparent reference to
the end of the NFL season he avidly followed as fan),
reads as follows:

"No More Games. No More bombs. No More Walking. No
More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past
50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am
always bitchy. No Fun -- for anybody. 67. You are
getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax -- This won't hurt."

I hate Football! So much violence and death...