Maybe, maybe not. Tina Fey certainly portrayed her that way, when they were backstage together at SNL in 2008, and Palin was really friendly to the cast, even to Fey, who was making lots of news with a really scathing satire of Palin. But I get the feeling that during that hypothetical margaritas-and-'tater-skins…

Definitely one of the best finales ever. My top-3, in no particular order are Newhart, Six Feet Under, and Blackadder Goes Fourth.

"So your girlfriend rolls a Honda, playin' workout tapes by Fonda
But Fonda ain't got a motor in the back of her Honda
My anaconda don't want none
Unless you've got buns, hun
You can do side bends or sit-ups,
But please don't lose that butt"

Thank you for giving us the phrase "at about the level of abstraction I'm willing to tolerate." I have a feeling I'm going to use variations of that a lot around here!

I wanted at least a bit more exploration of Ginsberg's and his father's history. Ginsberg mentioned something once about his father working on a "case." What kind of case? I assume it had something to do with property seized by the Nazis that he was trying to get back, but it's a shame to mention something as juicy…

Eh, I guess a lot of us think of them briefly as we pass them in the street, step over them to get through a doorway, etc. Not many of us do shit to help them, though.

Yeah, his death is newsworthy due to his lengthy and celebrated career, and that would be true if it had come 20 or 30 years down the road and he died of, essentially, old age. But he was only 63, so his death was even more newsworthy for that. And it wasn't disease or cancer or something like that that sadly cut…

"the idea that adult movies could be fun and interesting - and you learn about history at the same time!"

Maybe the tape was damaged by Williams's powerful magnetic personality. At least you'll always have the memory…until Alzheimer's sets in…

Holy fucking shit. I just can't get my head around the fact that someone born in nineteen fucking ninety is, or will be, 24-years-old this year.

Let's not forget the details about this incident that showed how almost preternaturally dense Dan Quayle was/is. He was in an elementary school classroom and one kid was up at the front of the room spelling words on the chalkboard. The chosen word was "potato," and the kid spelled it correctly. Quayle coached him…

It's been a sliding scale downward for a while.

Sure, it's fine. Like what you like. I've never been the biggest fan of his stand-up, and his talk-show appearances always left me more annoyed, like I would be with a moth in my room, than entertained. But I've been on the record for more than a decade now saying that Williams's comedic popularity was unfairly…

That sounds almost like a Buddhist or Hindu conception of hell (were they to have one): your suffering continues because you are unable or unwilling to let go of attachments, even an attachment to something as awful as despair, because you don't recognize the world around us as illusion.

Life will kill you, man.

This is the first I've ever seen of you, and it's already to much.

The flip side to that argument is that an archetypical story that has existed for 5000 or more years in just about every culture isn't tired or used up or played out; but, instead, is something that human beings desire to see and hear about again and again and again. Just like the hero's journey, a revenge story is…

Add Batman to that list, too, since the murder of his parents (one of which, necessarily, was his father) set him off on his career as a vigilante.

DeNiro looks like Barney Miller in that scene, but instead of reassuring Wojo, he's telling him what a fuck-up he is.

Here's how great Rocky is: a loved one was watching it for the first time, and when it was over, I asked how she liked it; despite Rocky's cries of "Adrian!" at the end having become a cliche, she had been moved to tears by that scene, and said, "I thought this was going to be a really stupid movie, but it turns out…