IIRC, Tomarken and his wife were flying out an organ for transplant when they crashed.

Right down to giving Baldwin a wireless stick mic modeled after Rayburn's famous Sony ECM-51. (Which, much as we may love that mic, the original version was prone to trouble and was loathed by some engineers.)

Twenty One could be done very well and with minimal tweaks, aside from not rigging the thing. The basic formula - complex questions, isolation booths, big money, two players not knowing each other's score, suspense - would still work. The original NBC version did it well with the dark lighting, the only real music…

I'm thinking, for instance, about how the outrage machine has made such a big to-do about one offhand sentence in the USA Today review of Dunkirk, the line about there being few female or minority roles in the film perhaps turning off some viewers. One half of a sentence in a very favorable review has generated such…

I'm also thinking Dressed to Kill, among others, and countless cop shows where the killer was somebody in drag, or Tootsie, where the whole gimmick was an actor using drag to get a job. Or in sitcoms, where somebody in drag was doing it to deceive someone (Monroe on Too Close For Comfort falling for a…

I thought she looked great during her moment in Pulp Fiction. Between how cute she looks and how goofy the scene is, it's a moment I always enjoy.

IIRC, Clarice says there's nothing in the literature that shows a correlation between transsexualism and being a killer, and that "transsexuals are very passive." Lecter uses that as kind of a jumping-off point to say "Billy's not a real transsexual" and explain why.

She talks a little bit about their friendship in the book God Said, "Ha!"

Yeah, being very familiar with the game show scandal I know about the legal prohibitions against doing so. What I meant wasn't the legal ramifications so much as the cultural fallout, and I should have made that clearer.

Something similar is at work with the new Pyramid. They don't screw around with what made the original work so well, and they made reasonable updates to the set. It's a neat reworking, and although nobody could be Dick Clark or Bill Cullen, Michael Strahan is a good choice to host. It all just works somehow.

I would say Twenty One - and unlike the Maury Povich version, actually rig it the way they did the original - but something tells me a rigged game show wouldn't be that big a deal these days.

I'm getting used to Tommy Maitland, although I think they spend a little too long on him mugging during the acts. The real weakness I've seen in the new Gong Show is the panel, where you have people either really buying into the concept a little too much, or trying to be a little too profound with it, or something.…

Related to LGBT, it appears the tweets forbidding transgender military service are about to become policy:

"Say, Gary! What are you doin' to that adorable little dog? We'd better talk this over in the library…."

This has the potential to make those incessant ASPCA commercials much more haunting, y'know.

Bo Dietl, that giant. I used to think he was goofy on the Don Imus show until I saw him in other contexts and saw he wasn't doing an act. His book Business Lunchatations (yes, really) makes you weep for the trees that had to die to make that book a reality.

You and I have much the same philosophy. My dad taught me how to shoot when I was 10 and I got my first gun not long after. I spent many an afternoon target shooting and learned how to do a little gunsmithing. I still enjoy getting over to the range when I'm able to. I have a modest collection of various guns that I…

I was about to add that some manufacturers include a free one-year NRA membership when you buy one of their guns, but you beat me to it. Taurus, among others, has made a big deal of it.

Sister city to Moonville, South Carolina.

I forget how many of those MPC model kits of the General Lee my brother and I must have gone through back then. When I was building one of them I screwed up the big flag decal for the roof and thought I could paint the flag on instead, and that turned into a fiasco. My parents still have a dining room chair with a big…