Baby Forrest Whittaker is the one I can't shake. The premise makes absolutely no sense but the execution was tremendous.

At least a couple of her appearances on Letterman from back in the 80s are on Youtube and they're worth checking out. He clearly thought she was fun.

Like the lead sentence says, she realized that she wasn't enjoying cartooning, and to be honest I think it showed in the later run of Ernie Pook. But the first decade or so of her stuff was incredible. Some absolutely top notch stuff about kids and the way they see the world.

This is going to sound dumb but my favorite thing about The Tick were the fight scenes. His complete nonchalance when he took on the gang of bad guys was hilarious to me, and I loved the way he reacted to getting hit by a board the way someone might react to getting hit by a toddler wielding a pool noodle. He's nigh…

The supporting cast for the movie is fantastic, one of the best ever. In the book everyone is filtered through Bromden's point of view, and most of the minor characters aren't particularly clear, but in the movie so many of them stand out due to great casting choices. Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, Scatman…

There's also a joke in The Freshman that Marlon Brando's character has the real Mona Lisa hanging in his house and the Louvre has a forgery.

I was there last month and right around the corner were the Louvre's other FOUR Leonardos. In just about any other museum of the world, any single one would be considered the centerpiece of their exhibits. While I was there maybe three other people stopped to see them. But to be fair, Mona Lisa is a great work of…

I worked in a Greek restaurant one summer and if you're really, truly curious, you put the cheese on a metal platter like you get in Mexican restaurants for fajitas. You stick it under a broiler so it gets really hot, so when you dose it with brandy the alcohol turns to fumes and that is what ignites. Then you shout…

David Morse in a Random Roles described his unhappiness with the way Tom Fontana turned his character into an ever-downwardly spiralling abyss of misery in St. Elsewhere. I get the sense that Fontana has a bad tendency to ruin good characters and piss off good actors for the sake of dumb plot twists

EL Konigsburg was another great writer for literate kids of the mid-ish 20th century. But I would say that there was a certain narrowness to books for somewhat older kids until fairly recently. If you look at the Newbury award winners for a good number of decades, there are a lot of clunkers, and for a long time the…

My kids and I loved The Happy Hocky Family, especially the parts where Cousin Stinky visited.

Fortunately the weather is supposed to take a turn for the cooler tomorrow. If there are parts that need to be ordered, I'll see if the leftovers are finished before the repairs are done.

I am home waiting for the AC repair guy to show up and I have a brisket in the Weber smoker. I'm having an informal race to see who finishes first.

On the opposite side of the political spectrum, he had a good impersonation of Barney Frank in Too Big To Fail.

Also, for the more obscure sports they tend to find announcers the way they ought to — find people who know something about the sport, then select the ones who can communicate clearly and enthusiastically.

I feel about the grand conspiracy in Bourne a lot like I feel about the alien conspiracy in The X Files. It's gotten so pervasive, so vague, poorly defined and malleable at this point that it's become like a long wait at the dentist. Whatever dread and terror there might have been originally, now you're just really…

If you want a Fallon-free version, Questlove also told that story when he was interviewed by Terry Gross.

I really liked the middle AND the beginning, but I agree the ending really fizzled out. I felt the same way about The Graveyard Book — he set up a huge confrontation and pretty clearly didn't know how to pull it off. I don't think he works well on an operatic scale but does the lower level stuff really, really well.

If I remember the book right, Shadow was smart, but it took him time to puzzle things out. I think it would spoil things in a preview if you jumped the gun and showed him knowing too much — although there's obviously no guarantee the show will get the progression of the character correctly.

The show really fell apart in the last couple of seasons. The claim often was it was the fault of the networks for demanding more action, but the fact is the action the writers and Tom Fontana put in was horrible too. The actor who played Falsone was weak, but they also hired Callie Thorne who is solid - basically the…