The pawn shop by my office has the complete multi-cassette Vincent Price cooking course.

Though I took my most successful musical, "Tink!," to Off-Broadway this summer, I'm sort of disappointed in myself for having the first year since 2011 when I didn't premiere at least one new musical onstage. (I did, however, contribute an original song to a new Christmas show, so the year gets an asterisk.)

DARQUEGK VERSUS CHRISTMAS: I made it all the way to V for "Very Special Christmas Volume 7" before Christmas Day. Next year I'll pick up from there with a much shorter marathon.

This. Trump is not a stupid man. He is an ignorant, and willfully, ignorant man. One can have a fully functional mind, cognitively speaking, and yet have no intellect, no "life of the mind" to speak of. One can be, as Trump appears to be, purely a venal and venial being.

I think it's a fascinating adaptation, but one that dispenses almost entirely with the shibboleth of M. R. Jamesian supernatural fiction: we flee the thing we most desire. I know "death of the author" is a thing, but it's hard to look at "Whistle" in particular as separate from James's loathing of his own homosexual…

You kidding? Trump would love Batman: he's rich, he has sex with all the pretty girls, he goes out at night and beats up the mentally ill.

What I wouldn't give for a Wes Anderson film of that book. Raskin wrote four novels, and "Westing Game" is best remembered but far from the weirdest. There's "Figgs and Phantoms," which is like "The Royal Tennenbaums" fused with "Wristcutters." There's "The Mysterious Disappearance of Leon (I Mean Noel)" which is a…

And it has an awesome car/gun hybrid!

This is a local shop for local people! There's nothing for youuu here.

Is that the version of "Whistle" that ends with him moaning "Oh no… oh no… oh no… oh no…" over and over again?

My Christmas-season tradition of "Phantom of the Paradise" also involves music by Paul Williams.

TFA is a retelling of the same basic hero-quest story and beats, but while A New Hope was influenced by 1940s war movies and 1950s boys'-own adventure serials, TFA draws from the post-Whedon sci-fi landscape.

It seemed to me it was Jones speaking in his "James Earl Jones" voice, not his Darth Vader voice. Like fanservice gone slightly off, he's abandoned the clipped Mid-Atlantic accent of the original Vader to embrace the hammier, broader sound of Black American Received Pronunciation for which Jones is so well known.

It seems a bit odd that asthma and lung defects seem to be a bigger deal in the Star Wars universe than in ours; think of how many characters have defective lungs or a noisy, painful breathing device.

I guess during reshoots no one had seen a leak of the last episode of Westworld yet- during the scene on the beach I kept expecting Anthony Hopkins to come around the corner and announce the new narrative at Star Wars World.

Ass Smashin' Creed

The show GIRLS, which is at least semi-autobiographical, explains that his main point of attraction is a ludicrous dong.

The real question is, does my ass make this Spidey suit look phat?

Top men, not bottoms.

Stanley Stupid? Meet Donald Dirtbag.