What I said last year about 'Raising the Bar' (and in previous years about crap like 'Crossing Jordan' and 'Judging Amy')—If the precious wordplay in a show's title is too clever by half, chances are that's the only clever thing about it.

'Oil in the Family'

Things I noticed
I don't know if it was the Slattery touch exactly, but I noticed a real tendency toward contrasting foreground and background composition in this episode, most notably the out-of-focus Robert Morse sighting and the hilarious image of Peggy peering over the divide to see what Don was up to after the…

Also, Vallejo's work isn't grimy or sweaty enough, and all his women look like biker chicks from the 80's. And pulpy as they are in content, Frazetta's works are like textbooks in composition and design.

You want more on Ral Partha? I lived in Dayton, OH in my nerdiest years and my first source of independent income was selling painted figures on consignment at a hobby shop called The Tin Soldier. I'd paint all the knights and dragons and shit that the public wanted at a steep mark up (cuz I was good, and I knew what…

The Death Dealer
That's the name of that axe-wielding guy up there. I know because I spent a lot of time in junior high studying a book of Frazetta paintings for ideas of how to paint my lead D&D figures (I think it was fom Ral Partha but I even had one that was based on The Death Dealer, which I went to great lengths…

My first girlfriend was a redhead named Sheila—I'm pretty sure there's a cause/effect relationship there.

all I can say is this:
Here's hoping Scarlett Johansson playing Black Widow leads to a proper reboot of Daredevil, this time done right with Fat Joe as the Kingpin and anyone but Ben Affleck as Matt Murdock. My nomination—Eric Stoltz, with (oh, what the hell) Oliver Platt as Foggy.

There are reasons to respect Sting and Rod Stewart. And maybe for about a month in '83 or '84 you could've marshaled enough respect for Bryan Adams to sing along to the "na na" chorus of 'Cut's Like a Knife' (and wasn't there a foxy swimmer in that video too?), but what ever led the three of them to have so little…

His character on Huff should have had his own show. And my prediction for 'The Big C' is that after the Laura Linney character gets diagnosed with terminal cancer, she starts cooking meth in an RV with a skinny kid who ends every sentence with the word "yo".

'Flatliners' was one of the first movies I remember seeing in the theater and noticing the art the direction. At the time I thought that made it pretty good, but I saw it again a while back and all the things that made the art direction noticeable the summer before I entered college were the exact same things that…

When I was on a trip to France in college, one of the guys we stayed with did an impression of Alf that was literally "I ate the cat!" over and over again. Actually, with a French accent, it's impossible to tell if he was saying "hate" or "ate" but they both worked and were equally hilarious, though perhaps not for…

'The Muppet Babies' sequence in 'Manhattan' was a fantasy sequence, all about how Piggy wished that she and Kermit had known each other all along, so it wasn't really a recon—add to that the fact that the cartoon itself, was built around the fantasy lives of the babies, and I think they get a little bit of license.…

Man, if that D&D cartoon had actually moved to an Oriental Adventures campaign, I would literally have exploded. I was so deep into Medieval Japan (Ninjas an' Samurai an' shit) at that point, and so hung up on Sheila the thief and Diana the acrobat, that I don't know if my geek tank could have gotten any fuller.

'Thundercats' was also an inconsisant narrative mess, if I remember correctly. Rules applied only half the time—stuff like that. But it did have Panthro—who in a just world, would have been the star of the show.

"Ookla is to Mok" The best part of that show was the opening—everything was downhill after that (which I guess is how typically it is with post-apocalypses)—but I love how they would say "and Ookla the Mok", as if they were taking for granted that we all already knew what the fuck a Mok was.

It's not just whether Gus is old enough to have run the region for what I'm guessing may be as little as ten or fifteen years (long enough for the cousins to be in their twenties anyway), but whether he's old enough for that as a second act in a life that included being a junta generalissimo. If he was really that,…

Yeah, I move that Nerdy get some kind of a nerd prize if that theory pans out.

Just ran into this:

I know what he was doing, and it's about as pretty as torture porn gets, but there was too much slow motion. I watched the last half in fast forward and didn't miss a thing.