Nice list! I've seen almost all of his "obvious" choices, but I haven't seen any of these. Time to get watchin'…

Thanks for the link. I felt like I'd read the article before, but then I realised that I'd just read a long quote from it in the nice New Yorker article about PK's life and work. An amazing quote: "Now, When the Lights Go Down, a collection of her reviews over the past five years, is out; and it is, to my surprise…

Yes, true! See: Dickens's introduction to Bleak House for more details.

The only question now: which two porn stars will Ashton choose?

A trenchant point. I'd felt that my possibilities for stardom and celebrity were disappearing because I'm getting old and am not pretty, but now I'm realising a sneaky connection between my possibilities for such fame and my length of time as a married dude. Hmmmmmmmm…….!

There's a Jim Gaffigan bit that comes to mind. The question: how do grandparents stay married for so long? The answer: "Don't leave, and don't die."

Is that the original magazine version of the essay? It seems shorter than the collected version I read, but I could be wrong; the browser format shortens things up.

I don't know. I've never felt David Lynch. It always seems to me like he withholds information just exclusively to fuck with you. I understand that this is probably a deliberate formal technique, but it doesn't work for me. I've watched quite a few of his films—some accidentally, but many simply because I've been told…

The robin is a freaky machine. You're calling that a happy ending?!

Is that right? I thought that Lynch wanted it to be helium, which would really give Hopper's performance a higher-pitched version of fucked-uppedness. I don't know where I heard that, however, so it could be BS.

(Speaking of stupid things, how's this sentence? "The Office writer, producer, actor talks about her new book why it’s okay to like stupid things." Niiiiice, copywriters…)

Finally! The inside scoop on OWS…

Might I suggest…marriage?

"Can you play video games or attend a sports game?"

The characters in Adaptation would just shake their heads in that sad "I told you so" way, and the characters in Little Children would watch him walk out of the room, recognise this as just another of life's big disappointments, and commence uncontrollable sobbing.

I carpooled with a couple veteran teachers for a while, one of whom was a social studies teacher, and he cited the scene where Broderick's character points with chalk thorough the Executive / Legislative / Judicial triangle over and over ad nauseum as the most realistic portrayal of the teaching life ever put to film.

Well, Gore Vidal does that sort of thing too, and it's funny. E.g. (to pull a sample quote): "One ought never to be surprised by the intolerant vehemence of fundamentalist Christers. After all, they started the country, and the seventeenth-century bigot Cotton Mather is more central to their beliefs than the…

Yes, but those are some spectacularly pretty pictures. Did you see The Fall in a theatre, or at home? I ask this because I watched it at home after really enjoying it at the theatre, and it was something of a disappointment. I wonder if this one might be worth going to now for the same reason.

Strangely, I've seen it a few times. It is my brother-in-law's favourite movie. It is an inoffensive and sweet rom-com.

Mentoring Alan Greenspan and becoming the Literary Saint of the current Republican party might be a start, if you need reasons.