Larry Flynt

The oddest of odd couples sits down for a chat with Larry King tonight."Mad About You" (6: 30 p.m.-7 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Paul invests in a virtual reality system after trying it out and getting a back rub from Christie Brinkley. Hard to believe, but this doesn't sit real well with Jamie. A classic."State Circle" (7: 30 p.m.-8 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) -- Just as the swallows return to San Capistrano every year, so, too, do the Maryland legislators return to Annapolis which means it's time for the return of this weekly round-up of things political.

AUSTIN, Texas -- The deepest secrets and innermost thoughts of America's most famous atheist are for sale.Madalyn Murray O'Hair, who founded the nation's leading atheist group, American Atheists Inc., in the 1960s and vanished in 1995, left behind a stack of diaries that will be sold next month to satisfy a claim against her estate brought by the Internal Revenue Service.The handwritten diaries, more than a thousand pages long, begin in 1953 and end abruptly seven weeks before O'Hair disappeared with her son, Jon Garth Murray, and granddaughter, Robin Murray-O'Hair.

As the holiday movie season approaches, the magazines are dangling actress Oscar bait from their covers. Nicole Kidman, looking positively embalmed, tips her cleavage to the readers of November's Premiere, promoting both her star turn in Jane Campion's forthcoming "Portrait of a Lady" and the sheer and absolute perfection of her marriage to Tom Cruise. "It doesn't feel like seven years to me at all," she gushes.The underdog nominee may be Kristin Scott Thomas, that British actress from "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "A Handful of Dust" and "Angels and Insects," who's about to appear with Ralph Fiennes in the season's biggest and highest-minded romance, "The English Patient."

Larry Flynt, the man who made America safe for pornography, will open a new "gentleman's club" in Baltimore tonight with a promise to add some class to the seedy strip-joint center known as The Block. If nothing else, Larry Flynt's Hustler Club will bring a new architectural feature to the city's tenderloin, one block south of City Hall: a glass dance floor that allows patrons on a lower level to look up performers' skirts. Except they won't be wearing skirts. The club is all nude. "It's not a sleazy operation," the Hustler magazine publisher said in a telephone interview yesterday.

WHY IS IT so difficult for politicians to deal with The Block? When Alex. Brown was thinking of relocating its headquarters from downtown in the mid-1990s, then-Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke pledged to phase out the red-light district. But that goal has been lost, and the authorities have pretty much adopted a hands-off attitude. This noninterference started three years ago. In an action hailed for toughness at the time, the zoning board ordered three clubs permanently out of business and six others closed temporarily.

Imus now believes he caused Clintons inappropriate painFinally, somebody feels President Clinton's pain. Of course, he caused it in the first place.At last year's Radio-Television Correspondents' Association Dinner in Washington, radio personality Don Imus joked about the president's alleged extramarital affairs and Hillary Clinton's alleged financial peccadilloes. The Clintons were sitting just a few feet away.Now, Imus says in the June issue of George magazine: "It wasn't whether it was funny or not; it was whether it was appropriate.

The New Yorker for Jan. 6 has an excellent, well-rounded piece on Hollywood, George Lucas and his "Star Wars" industry, which thrives 20 years after the first installment of the futuristic trilogy hit theaters. The article, written by John Seabrook, is occasioned by the rerelease of a digitally enhanced version of the trilogy, beginning with "Star Wars" Jan. 31, "The Empire Strikes Back" three weeks later, and "The Return of the Jedi" two weeks after that. Also, Lucas is now at work on a second "Star Wars" trilogy for release in 1999, 2001 and 2003.

LOS ANGELES - His ex-wife, Jane Fonda, has found religion and divorced her latest husband. His most famous co-defendants in the Chicago Seven trial, the courtroom confrontation between anti-Vietnam War protesters and the establishment, are dead. And Tom Hayden himself? At 61, he's still thinking globally. The former 1960s radical is a marquee speaker at protest rallies against global trade. But time and circumstance are forcing him to act more locally than ever before. Barred by term limits from remaining in the California legislature, he's fighting hard for a seat on the Los Angeles City Council in today's runoff election.

CHICAGO - In 2000, Congress identified a grave national problem and took firm action to squelch it. Alarmed that some youthful library patrons had gained access to online pornography, it passed the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA). The problem was solved, the panic subsided, and we all went on to other worries, serene in the knowledge that children were no longer being exposed to vile smut. In fact, though, the measure never took effect, thanks to a court challenge that held it in abeyance.

In the late '70s, Toby Orenstein recalls, she gave a local child a small role in a production of "Annie Get Your Gun."Orenstein, active in Howard County dramatics since Columbia's founding in the early '70s, recollects that the child knit up his face in concentration and then asked a question that has haunted her on down the years. She had heard it from no child before or since."What," asked the 8-year-old Edward Norton, "is my objective in this scene?""He was amazing," she remembers, delightedly.