Yes. Yes it is.

Yeah, I noticed it as well. She's ubiquitous. There is no escape!

In terms of Downey's post-drug career "Ally McBeal" is definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Downey Jr. is also fantastic in "A Scanner Darkly". He still does consistently great, consistently challenging work, he just does it outside of James Toback movies. I don't think he ever stopped improvising either.

Studley, that certainly seemed to be the essence of his characters in "Must Love Dogs" and "Serendipity".

Yeah, we'd definitely do a Random Roles with him. He's been great in a lot of stuff.

I find it interesting that Ramis is such a regional filmmaker in a lot of ways. He shoots almost all his movies near Chicago, including this one, which was filmed, I believe, in Glencoe.

yeah, but it's such a dark film and the characters are so irredeemable—think of all the horrible things Cusack does over the course of the film—that a happy ending feels a little cheap and unearned.

This is the umpteenth repackaging of The Last Picture Show so it seemed to make sense to focus on Nickelodeon, which has been pretty damned unavailable for decades.

D-I-V-O-R-C-E
In Haggard's book he talks about how Bonnie Owens, his second ex-wife, was game enough to sing back-up for Haggard and his third ex-wife. Owens, incidentally, was also the ex-wife of fellow Bakersfield legend Buck Owens, who screwed Haggard out of some money early in his career.

Within the context of Davis Jr's career and personality it doesn't sound that far-fetched. He was a pretty aggressive, pretty wild individual and his loyalty bordered on pathological.

It should be noted
that this clip goes on and on and on and on.

yeah, based on his introduction I worried Odenkirk's character would be too broad. It was very Mr. Show and while I love Mr. Show and Breaking Bad I'm not sure they should inhabit the same universe. But the episode was fucking great. Odenkirk was a buffoon, but an incredibly wily and mutely sinister one. It's so…

Thanks. That was a good line.

I only hope the Femmes stuck to their policy of only playing new material.

yeah, the instrumentation is pretty swank, what with the congas and saxophone and whatnot.

I definitely will cover Buck Owens and Lefty Frizzell in upcoming weeks. I wanted to do Haggard's tributes to Bob Wills and Jimmie Rodgers but they're both way, way, way out of print. So I think I'm going to write about Haggard's life (I started his autobiography today) and four theme compilations his label put out…

well, Rhymefest does hurl about five gay-bashing epithets at Hamilton in about two minutes, which seems just a tad bit excessive. By regular hip hop standards it's nothing egregious. By Rhymefest standards it's very disappointing.

I feel like I may have overstated the mixtape's homophobia
It's not as if every song is wall-to-wall gay-bashing. It's incredibly prevalent on the Charles Hamilton diss song and pops up elsewhere as well but "The Manual" is considerably less homophobic than, say, the Marshall Mathers LP, which I have a hard time…

That's what next week is for.