The Ezra Stiles dean gets a free apartment in the tower, makes weird pronouncements while eating brunch, and mostly exists, as do other Yale residential college deans, to provide Dean's excuses—a get-out-of-jail-free card for a missed assignment deadline each semester. The Dean during my time in Stiles, Herbert…

If not my kids, then my cars. Oh for a Toyota Tercel!

I was quoting Roger Allam (to Sloane Ranger Olivia Poulet, in 'The Thick of It') when I chose this login; the kids are a cliche' in Britain. I lived across Regent(!) St. from Jessica in 1990's Oakland, she was a small, sweary, boozy (I saw the Truehaft's to-be-recycled bottles in their curbside collection crate on my…

This work is not without precedent, see

Baldrick, Blackadder, in at least 3 of the 4 series.

He was brilliant in 'The Hour'—playing a control freak who, of course, becomes absolutely undone with sorrow. Bonus—he's opposite Anna Chancellor yet again. I picked my account name after I posted a comment suggesting watching 'The Thick of It' to cure holiday blues and I've been familiar with the actor ever since he…

Similarly, I'll see anything with Anamaria Marinca. (Look her up on IMDB if the name is not familiar).

Stanley Tucci has an uncanny resemblance to a 'burn in effigy at G8 meeting protests' economist Kenneth Rogoff, so much so that I could imagine Stanley learned a Rochester accent for 'NewsHour' imposture.

It's his real name, and he went to my high school (Hunter College High School, '81).

Available to all are the northwest passage and others into lobbies of surprisingly distant office buildings. The northwest begins at Madison and 47th and includes beautiful tiled corridors, in a tealish color I remember as 'WPA Green.' My heels made a very satisfying hard clicking sound on the floors as I marched…

Cumberbatch made a great ambiguous figure verging on villain but most of non-brig time was edited for StarTrek fanboys, not 'Batch fangirls; I might have enjoyed an extra second or two of Khan with his collar up, looking cool or being badass. The while-imprisoned acting (nominally quite powerful) was opposite Pine,…

I've seen photos of skeletons like these (under headlines like 'scene of ancient pathos revealed') when villages destroyed by millennia-ago earthquakes are excavated; family members huddled together in their last moments before their houses collapsed.

while I thought of the Academy of Projectors in Lagado (Gulliver's Travel, voyage 3). Nerd stereotypes have a very long pedigree—this visit now reads like DEMO 1735. A grant for 'extracting the sunbeams out of cucumbers' sounds pretty quantum, too.

When Bones says 'He's dead, Jim," the corpse typically wears a red shirt.

Don't forget Stephen Ezard in 'The Last Enemy' (shown on PBS, full series is on YouTube, uploaded by PBS, so can be watched without that transgressive frisson associated with torrents). There's a cut to last step of his calculation of a singularity that includes partial derivatives; my math major's heart went…

Somehow I feel this is standard advice, larded with Conan-Doyle quotes, packaged to win Maria Konnikova a date with Benedict Cumberbatch. Well done!

The Thick of It free on Hulu, from the BBC. Watch the writers weaponize the English language (see any Malcolm Tucker highlight reel on YouTube) for inspiration if you need to say more than 'Bah fucking humbug.' Tucker is played by Peter Capaldi, who was just on the second season of BBC's 'The Hour,' he's equally…