Hugh Laurie will always be my image of the Prince Regent.

Well there goes my respect for the bastion of subtle wit and good taste that is Tromeo and Juliet.

This reminds me of a COBOL class I had in the late 90s (yeah, it was an anachronism). The professor had been rotating a couple of years worth of curriculum, and the school discovered that somebody was selling his old programming projects too current students. When I got into the class the professor had just redesigned…

During my middle school early 90s our computers were pretty locked down. They were late mid-’80s vintage IBM PS/2s without hard drives. All of the software was stored on the network so you had to boot from the network to access any of it. One day I discovered that you could ctrl-break out of the touch typing tutor…

I mean, I never read it out loud to anyone either. But I have a son and nieces who will be ready to hear these stories eventually...

I’m gonna quote Zaphod Beeblebrox here: “Look, property is theft, right? Therefore theft is property. Therefore, this ship is mine.”

It helps, a little.

Did anyone else read the headline and immediately think of the story from Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark where the old lady digs up Neil Armstrong’s corpse, steals his vial of moon dust, and then for the rest of the night she hears a voice wailing “Where is my vial of mooooon dust?” I always liked the part at the…

Parents who teach their kids slang terms for genitalia have always gotten on my nerves, but the last straw occurred some years ago when a theater in Florida presented a production of The Hoohah Monologues after the word vagina on their marquee made somebody squeamish. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m so much more…

You know they’ve already made this, right? It’s called Three Men and a Baby. It’s basically what you’ve suggested, except instead of apes it’s three men, and instead of taking over the planet they take care of a baby.

I don’t watch cooking shows (or other shows, really; I’m bad at TV), but I want to put in a vote for Julia Child as the greatest pragmatist of cooking television. She was obviously a good cook, but she had no aversion to occasionally using convenience foods as a shortcut, and sometimes she’d let the cameras keep…

True story: When I was in seventh grade, my class took a 5-day camping trip, and one kid got up shortly after lights out to eat toothpaste because he was hungry. There was a brief “that’s gross” from everybody, and nobody thought anything of it until the ambulance picked him up at like, two or three in the morning.…

Alternatively:

• What is your favorite kind of crust? After literally decades of not understanding my own preferences, I am finally coming around to the fact that although I really like thick, pan-style crusts, my absolute favorite is very thin and crispy.
  

Really? I never felt like fantasy and horror were marginalized in the YA world when I was a kid in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, but it’s also not unlikely that I was narrowly perusing the margins. Those Daryl Gregory novels you mentioned sound promising, so I might check them out. When I first bought a Kindle, Amazon was…

I first encountered Bellairs in elementary school through his Anthony Monday series, which is probably the least well-known of his three series for children. I’ve read all of those books (I think—there are quite a few, and it’s been several years), and The Face in the Frost, which is wonderful. I wish he’d done a…

I used to be skeptical of Jack Black, but I’ve come to appreciate that he knows when not to act up. I’m fine with his casting and I’ll give Roth the benefit of the doubt, but I’d like to see an older Mrs. Zimmerman and a portlier Lewis.

Roth is in the right age range to have read some of those books when they came out. Here’s hoping he gives interviews in the coming months gushing about how he’s been waiting to see this movie since he was eight.

I prefer to use plain yogurt—sometimes with some of the liquid strained out—rather than sour cream. There’s definitely a taste difference that would probably not please everybody.