There's an episode where Martin keeps beating Frasier at chess, and it drives Frasier nuts.  Finally Martin gets offended and points out that he's not stupid, and it's insulting for Frasier to treat him that way because he doesn't have a classy background.

The Diane episode is brilliant, but what I love best is the implication that, between working in sitcoms and trying to write a play about her life in Boston, Diane's ultimate destiny will be to create "Cheers."

This is coming in late, but…I met Peter S. Beagle yesterday.

I just listened to every song covered in this feature so far, because I hate myself, and "Scars" is still the worst.

You jest, but title confusion may be the crucial factor that pushes Bad Company's "Rock and Roll Fantasy" to my personal #1 hate song slot.  The Kinks just have such a superior rock 'n' roll fantasy, with no jesters or anything.

I hadn't heard it either, though I was vaguely aware of it.  Until this moment, I just knew it as that bar mitzvah song by the Black Eyed Peas I've somehow avoided for three years.  Now I can know it as that song that sounds pretty much like every other song on the radio during that time.

No, I like Spartacus.

Dammit, Overnight was going to be MY obscure pick!  There are a few episodes and clips floating around YouTube, and it's still eminently watchable even though the news itself is 30 years old.  I would buy a DVD set of Overnight so fast it'd make your head spin.

It was!  The book on which Grave of the Fireflies was based is common assigned reading in Japanese schools, so the Ghibli adaptation was heavily promoted for its educational/literary value.  Not only that, but it originally ran on a double bill with Totoro as the B feature.  I guess they had to put Totoro second so…

If there were a Hulu-like service with complete online archives of long-running soap operas, it would be awesome and also my mother would never leave the Internet.  Imagine reliving Luke's oh-so-romantic rape of Laura any time you desire!

A while back I was talking to a librarian about animation, and she casually mentioned that she used to work for LucasFilm and was one of the writers of Twice Upon a Time.  She was surprised that anyone remembered it.  I freaked out so hard.  It was like meeting the actual Last Unicorn.

I don't think Neighborhood Story has ever been officially translated, either the anime or the manga.  At least Paradise Kiss is getting a reprint.

I remember watching it in my fifth-grade classroom in the '80s, which now just amazes me.

I think the "damn those bitches with their impossibly high romantic standards" whine can be discounted by the fact that in the very same thread women are swooning over Steve Buscemi in a tweed suit.

It seems like "he's white but they think he should be black!" would be mildly funny exactly once.  The problem is that you make the joke in the first episode, and then you're stuck with this one-off gag as one of the central characters for the rest of the show's run.
But I thought people would get tired of the evil…

Obviously it's very important for the adoption of a pair of different-race twins with the personalities of the adult costars of a comedy show to adhere to stark reality, so let me point out that in the previous episode it was established that the kids, being siblings, had to be adopted together.  So anyone wanting the…

Someone's got a cruuuush…

Things Liz Lemon did on "30 Rock" mere days or weeks after I'd done them in real life:

I wrote a BASIC text adventure game that ultimately got too big for the family PC to run.  My downfall was in my insistence on having a HELP option.  I got obsessed with writing different helpful hints for every single juncture in the game.  I frequently ran out of hints, so sometimes when you typed HELP you got…

For some time now I've been putting myself through a self-improvement program that includes memorizing classic poetry.  I've done Yeats, Keats, and Edna St. Vincent Millay.  My current project is the Huey Lewis and the News monologue from "American Psycho."