@avclub-cb0e59b8f769a8698b9f7154dd8809b5:disqus - His response to Cotton's verbal abuse was a sincere seeming "¿que es un Tojo?".

I'm not sure about the ending being a particular TNG ep, but the basic premise was essentially Bender's personal Shore Leave (boom. yummy.)

It kind of bothered me that he could tell Kahn was Laotian, yet his death hinged on thinking the Spanish speaking cook at the Benihana type restaurant was Japanese. I suppose you can chalk it up to his rage at being in a Japanese restaurant and decreased faculties.

I just read it as the guy lording his tiny amount of power over Tom.

Chico & Harpo both get their musical numbers in Horse Feathers, though Chico maybe does more singing than usual. They just lack the non-Marx straight musical numbers that cropped up mostly in their later films. Though I'll admit Cosi Cosa in Night at the Opera has actually grown on me.

@avclub-f9e1b74986ef91100415c120c46fcd3c:disqus - Like him as in feel he makes the show better or as in feel sympathy for/want to hang out with?

Presumably his mother (or grandmother?) is a Chadwick who married a Tillman.

Well, the soundtrack did leave me with an inexplicable urge to buy an ipad.

Monk works a lot better than he(?) should, but the move to America and Bea's increased introversion have hurt the character. He needs more than just Tom at the other end of the phone to work off of.

That made at least two Goldfinger refs in this episodes with Jonas' tuxedo under the wetsuit earlier in the ep.

They were headed to the Onasis-Bouvier/Kennedy wedding,  where L. Ron presumably kidnapped the bride. And unless somebody just messed with wikipedia, they actually did get the dates right - Wally Schirra was in orbit on Apollo 7 at the time. And oddly enough, this is all just a month before last night's Mad Men.

Not possible for St. Cloud to ever become more than a pop-reference gag machine? Gary would beg to differ. Taking background and one-gag characters and elevating them into full fledged characters is what this show does.

He's just been sent off to LA because he can't drive. LA.

I don't have as much information as I'd like about the horse.

A little padding and he could totally pull off live action Gene Belcher.

Pi arrrrr squared

So much of this show does sound somewhere between weak and awful on paper, yet I still find myself really enjoying it. It rescues enough of the iffy ideas in execution (Monk probably being the best example) and most of the others are benign enough not to kill the better parts.

I enjoyed both parts and the songs are definitely what's stuck with me, but I did feel like the episodes with the best sitcom parts had the weakest songs and vice versa.

Imagine Hadfield with a shaved head. Now, try to imagine that he's not doing "crystal growth experiments" up there.

Reminds me of the time my friends and I visited an amusement park and we asked the callow youth running the funnel cake stand "what's the difference between funnel cake and fried dough?"  His unsalesmanlike response? "Funnel cake's just like fried dough, except it sucks."