The stronger the superhero, the fewer syllables in his ordinary-person name: Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent, etc. Therefore, Captain Nice (Carter Nash) is stronger than Mister Terrific (Stanley Beamish). Q.E.D.

I did see 1776 on Broadway (junior high school field trip to NYC) and although I agree about the deficiencies of the movie, the show did avoid the sorts of tinkering that often ruin adaptations of musicals. Of course, the same could be said for Susan Stroman's The Producers, which turned out even more inert.

Did the piano win, or did you?

It was THE last single (b/w the Harrison trifle "For You Blue"); not much else to distinguish it, but a lot of people (including me) bought it for that reason.

That record has no key change.

Even better than the one in "Ball and Chain" is the one in "Senses Working Overtime" from the same album. The first two choruses are in E, then when it finally comes back around at the end, it's in F.

The Beatles did this sort of thing rarely. "Good Day Sunshine" has two quick successive upward key changes or modulations at the end (although that track is not the best example, because until that point it keeps throwing the listener off as to what the "home" key really is). The opposite - a succession of downward…

The Pretenders' "Back on the Chain Gang" is a good one; it happens in an unusual way, too: The main body of the song is in D major, then there's a contrasting segment in D minor, which then (surprisingly) moves up to E major on "making us part," leading into the near-repeat of the first verse. It's like a fookin'…

The funniest Maggie Smith movie I ever saw in a theater was A Private Function, with her and Michael Palin starring as a middle-aged married couple in early-1950s Britain. Not a spoiler, I trust, but when the story resolves happily, she says to him, "I believe seck-sual intercourse is in order!" in the most perfect…

We are supposed to care about Lost now, of all possible TV series that are candidates for retrospectives? There is exactly one scene of the entire series that I remember fondly: the very first scene of season 2, set to "Make Your Own Kind of Music" as sung by Mama Cass.

MANTERGEISTMANN!

Named for its discoverer some 300 years from now, Charles Fort Jaunte.

Actually the robot butler (bartender, I think) not only has a funny moment or two, it actually dispenses genuine wisdom in its final scene, just before it "fizzed, jangled, and collapsed."

I've read and reread this novel for 40 years (the version in the two-volume Treasury of Great Science Fiction, the late-'50s SF anthology edited by Anthony Boucher that was a longtime offering of the SF Book Club) and I can easily understand why it's resisted attempts to get a film off the ground. In a novel, the idea…

There were many differences between the 1956 British (Tiger! Tiger!) version and the 1956-57 serial in Galaxy magazine, and further differences arose in the first U.S. Signet paperback edition.

To be even more precise, it was the advent of NBC's big 1967-68 midseason hit Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In that resulted in the Fall 1968 Monday time slot being given to Laugh-In instead of Star Trek as had been promised. Roddenberry threatened to quit as line producer if NBC didn't reconsider; NBC didn't reconsider, so…

Excuse me if someone else has already raised this point about the events of 50 freakin' years ago, but just to clarify:

He and Allison Janney were the best thing about Juno.

It would have been a lot more popular had they left unchanged its original title during production, Starship Dave. Or maybe not.

Nothing against Mr. Newman, whose work I've long admired (I've had an LP of Sail Away since 1972), but "You've Got a Friend In Me" and "Wouldn't Have Nothing if I Didn't Have You" are practically indistinguishable from each other, so this doesn't constitute much of a complaint.