Thanks for my semi-annual reminder about Crazy People, a movie that I will completely forget about and then, usually out of the blue, start saying to myself, “Sony....Bony” and “You can’t go, we love you. And if you attempt to leave we will try to kill you.”

“God bless you, half-man, half-pig!”

Well, it was either that or “It’s my first day.”

“Conveniently located near hospital.” That’s one that I saw in a neighborhood where I used to live—to be as charitable as possible, a comma or semicolon might make it technically true and geographically descriptive (“Conveniently located; near hospital” could mean that it’s highway adjacent and if you were looking for…

No idea how far along the project is or if anything will ever materialize from it, though.

I dunno...I’d be much more convinced if I knew that as soon as you hit “Publish,” you immediately did a “The Aristocrats!” hand flourish.

Probably wise. I remember having a moment of panic during the Casey Anthony trial when her Google searches were entered into the evidence and realized that my habit of going down “now that I think about it, I don’t know” rabbit holes had, in the previous months, included “where does one get chloroform” and “how long…

A couple of years ago I read a biography of Oppenheimer, and one is impressed at how dedicated Feynman was at trolling his army handlers at Los Alamos, from the simple (after the army censors told him that he had to stop mentioning them in his letters to his wife, he took to saying things like, “I can’t say more--the…

It’s happened plenty of times—among the more interesting ones from Wikipedia were Barbara Bush (when she was known to be in failing health, CNN worked up an obit to publish when it happened, then someone leaked it a couple of days before she died), Marcus Garvey (who had a stroke, had his obit read to him, then had…

Oh, it was even worse than a text that could be seen as adding to a novel in any meaningful way—it was literary criticism.*

I hate audience questions period.

So that explains why that clip was in that British Newlywed Game blooper compilation on YouTube!

It’s at least theoretically possible that it’s not the most important takeaway from the video, but sometimes terms exist for a reason:

To be built in a city whose name sounds really familiar, but you don’t know why, in a state that you get wrong at the first try in Google. (“Dayton? I think I’ve heard of a Dayton. Let’s see—oh, here it is, in Tenness—no, I don’t think that’s the one.”)

Zeljko Ivanek was in a pretty interesting documentary a few years ago called That Guy...Who Was in that Thing (or something like that) about character actors and how they manage to cobble together careers based on sometimes incredibly inconsistent small roles--jobs they pick up to ends meet, help from family like one…

Farewell to the man whose image—and I say this with affection—you would get if a sketch artist woke you up from a dead sleep screaming for you to describe someone from Chicago.

When I read that he had died, my first thought was of a joke he told...I think at one roast or another: “A guy gets called to the hospital because his wife was taken in. When he gets there, the doctor tells him, ‘I’m afraid she’s comatose, and has lost all powers of sight, hearing and speech. And she has no muscle…

Even though he did a couple of movies, credit to Saget for staying true to himself and focusing more on standup and TV instead of trying to do more “serious” work. And sure, he could have cozied up to the right press people to be more widely acclaimed, or kissed up to some producer to get added on to some Oscar-bait…

Around the time Nixon came out, I seem to remember reading that at one point during the early part of the production they brought Rich Little around to do his Nixon impression for the cast. When he was done, Hopkins went into character by hunching his shoulders, turning around, and walking away without saying anything,…

It was my first thought, if only because I’m pretty sure my 4'11" mother, who is generally friendly to all, loathes Randy Newman to this day because of the song. I’m not even sure if it’s because people taunted her with it back in the day--she just hates it so much that I think she’s planning on living however long…