Happy birthday!

The fact that I knew who Graham Norton was because of that show but had never heard of David Beckham at the time was the source of much amusement to some British/Australian friends I made while teaching overseas.

Good choice, but I can see why that would be your last one. Yes, she's naked a lot, but it's not erotic in the least because of the overarching sense of dread that permeates the whole film.

I'm still mad they didn't get Angela Bassett.

Hey, there's an idea for a Q&A: the last non-porn movie you paid to see strictly to see one of the actors naked. For me: Taking Lives. I tried to watch The Girl Next Door a few weeks later but starting hating myself within the first five minutes and had to turn it off.

True, as these kinds of games go, it's more straightforward, and since it's a co-op, it's okay to just tell the newbie what they should do without it feeling like a practice game, though my point was more that it's difficult to play it straight out of the box if no one knows the rules. Of course, just about any game…

That would be an improvement. In the Marvel version, you usually can't attack until your third or fourth turn at the earliest, which means at least one or two enemies will escape almost every time.

I'm intrigued. We played the Marvel version a bunch of times, but the missions varied in difficulty so much that half of them seemed more luck than strategy. And of course there's my standard complaint with deckbuilders: too much shuffling.

Yep. Myrmes, Castles of Burgundy, Pandemic, Flashpoint, etc. It doesn't help that the rule books are poorly designed in general.

Boy, that one was a heartbreaker.

ANOTHER PROPHECY FULFILLED!!!

It was one of the last gasps of the kind of kids' variety show that Krusty was originally supposed to be parodying: comedy skits and other segments interspersed with cartoons.

There's another skinchanger who has a pet boar that Ghost didn't get along with. I think that was the rationale.

After Man by Dougal Dixon does a similar thing, speculating on how the smaller species would evolve to fill niches after we die out and take the big animals with us.

Candlepin bowling or GTFO.

At least let him write one. I'd say the possibility of something as awesome as Anakin's knighting making it to the big screen is worth the risk.

Bird's M:I entry was serviceable, if a bit cartoony, appropriately enough.

It's not so much that it's good as it's much better than the critical reception made it out to be (the knives seemed to be out for it from the beginning, both on the critics' and studio's part) so some of that enthusiasm may be just pushback. It's difficult to tell who's who in it in a lot of cases, partly because a…

He basically did win it for The Insider, part of the Academy's bizarre tradition of awarding Best Actor to whoever deserved it the year before but lost because they had to give it to the guy who deserved it the year before that, and so on.

Friday was my birthday, and since my birthdays are apparently doomed to be sad and awful forever, I spent about five hours of it on the phone arguing with Blue Cross Blue Shield trying to get my policy reinstated (they scheduled it for that day and then didn't call me. I'd have waited, but it's my freakin' health…