Dead Hollywood.

An appealing memorial to those who crossed over to the other side this year:



Via Throwing Things where there's one comment: "TCM totally made the right call on their choice for the final slot. My mind just went directly to James Garner." But James Garner is second to the last, not the last. And the person shown last is the right call. And it's not Robin Williams or Philip Seymour Hoffman.

"Kenny G's Revenge."

"When did the weird lopping sax become so popular in pop music?"

"Jayceon (and Jayse/Jayce), Milan, Atlas, and Duke for the boys; Daleyza, Marjorie, Lennon, Jurnee, and Everlee/Everleigh for girls."

To answer your question which names are rising fastest on the newest charting of popular baby names.

Resist mockery. Remember: Babies are named by people who have babies. Don't like the names? Have your own baby.

Oh! Speaking of names... we — and by "we," I mean the Green Bay Packers — got the player with the best name: Ha Ha Clinton-Dix. And no, that was not a joint. Nor was this.

And.... if you don't like Dix, check out the Dox.



AND: Look at the popularity of my name in relation to the similar names, all more complicated:



My parents believed in sleek modernity. Who knew the future would be so old-timey?

"I'm angry that my weird, nerdy hobby has been coopted..."

"... by other people's weird, nerdy hobby."

Shame on NBCUniversal! It's shutting down Television Without Pity and even making all its old content unavailable to the public.

Incredible! I've been reading Television Without Pity since... I think as long as there's been the web. Since long before I started blogging (in 2004). Before I even owned a laptop, before there was WiFi, I used to print out pages of TWoP recaps to have something with me to read when I went out walking and stopped in a café. And don't tell me that sentence makes it look like I read while walking. I did read while walking in those days before iPods and digital audiobooks. I read Television Without Pity! What was the point of watching a show like, say, "American Idol" if you weren't going to laugh at it reading Television Without Pity?

Is there any NBC show that I've watched in the last 15 years? "Seinfeld" ended 16 years ago, so maybe not. Damn them! I guess I didn't need TWoP to watch NBC because even with TWoP, it wasn't worth watching.

Why is NBC destroying this internet treasure?

The sassy TWoP TV review and recap site — its motto is “Spare the snark, spoil the networks” — was purchased by NBCU’s Bravo cable unit in 2007. Both were founded in the Web 1.0 era.

I guess the network decided it wanted to spoil itself. It wants to be spoiled. Or it already was spoiled and not even snark could save it. Damn them!

The closing impacts 64 employees at the women-focused DailyCandy and three at TWoP....

It only took 3 employees to run TWoP?! You can't string along 3 employees? (As for DailyCandy, sorry, I don't follow it, despite being a woman, or perhaps because I am the kind of woman who doesn't want my reading woman-focused).

The reason for the closing down was pretty basic: Despite creating laudable sites, there was still not enough traffic and, therefore, a difficulty monetizing the properties, especially in the wake of increased competition since the pair were first founded.

You bought it, it was what it was, so perfectly what it was that you couldn't change it, so you killed it, you fuckers. Great value had been created, you cast your greedy eyes upon it, you thought you could leverage that value, and all you did was destroy it.

Why did NBC buy it, to ruin it? Is it like the Koch Brothers buying the NYT, keeping it going for 7 years, then liquidating the whole operation? Except NBC — and Universal, it's apparently one atrocious entity — is a media operation, reaching out to us, wanting our eyes, ears, and minds. NBCUniversal needs our love or at least our tolerance. I absolutely hate them for this.

Here's how the message is delivered over at Television Without Pity:



Here's the discussion at Throwing Things, where I learned the news. The general opinion seems to be that NBC is only closing what it had already ruined, and "classic Television Without Pity" was already dead. Typical comment:

I can't remember the last time I visited Zombie TWoP. But the quality of the writing and the crazy depth and detail of each recap on OG TWoP was phenometastic.

I'd love to get a scraped archive of the recaps (without having to click through each link.)

And:

Once they had a Project Runway recapper who didn't know what a bias cut was, I was gone, but man, I used to spend days deep in the forums debating Veronica Mars, and it was great for catching up on missed shows or shows you started late or when you wanted to read a dissertation on a "Battlestar Galactica" episode. So, yes, not surprised, but sad.

So you want to get started working in the TV news business?

Prepared to be required to do things like this:



Via Adam at ALOTT2MO, who somehow thinks the women are being "objectified" in a manner that the men are not.

ADDED: Am I the only one who hears "Blurred Lines" and thinks of "Working in the Coal Mine"? Here it is by Lee Dorsey (doing a strange promo for the Brits):



And here's the later Devo version.

Lee Dorsey is best known for the great oldie "Ya Ya." Here's Petula Clark in 1962 updating the song by singing it in French and dancing the twist:



Everything is always recycling: Those newsfolk in that "Blurred News" promo do the twist at least some of the time.

"The four spellers before you receive 'quandary,' 'ethanol,' 'brigadier' and 'chary.'"

"Then you're asked to spell ahn-uh-MASS-tuh-kon, 'a collection or listing of words especially in a specialized field.' Yeah, life's not fair sometimes."

"For the third time in the past twenty years, NBC seems serious about replacing Jay Leno with the funnier guy in the 12:30am slot."

"While he remains atop the ratings (overall and in 18-49s), Leno's current deal expires in fall 2014, and, gosh, never seen this sentence before: 'Given the past turbulence involved in changing hosts, NBC wants to make the transition ... as smooth as possible.'"

How long do you think it will take before they bring back Leno this time?
	Less than 6 months.
	6 months to a year.
	More than a year.
	This time he's gone and he's never coming back.
pollcode.com free polls

"Middle seat gets both armrests. This way, everybody gets at least one armrest, and it best equalizes everybody's space."

"If you think that the shared armrests are for whoever first claims them — a rule that frequently would leave the middle-seater wedged between two elbowy people — you have entitlement issues."

#8 on a list of 12 rules for airports and airplanes.

And this post is following a rule for blogging that I just noticed: If you find something to blog about via a blog that deserves a "via" (or "hat tip") link, you can better fulfill your obligation by finding something else on the hat-tippable blog and doing a separate post about that. This post represents the something else, and the next post will be the thing I found via this blog, and I'm not going to put a "via" link on the next post.

The idea is that the blog I'm linking to here will get far more click-through readers from this post than from a "via" link that telegraphs its obligatory quality. I'm going to follow this rule in the future — and by the way, I think Instapundit follows it — but I'm not going to keep pointing out that I follow it. And I won't follow it unless I genuinely would have chosen to blog the something else, in accordance with the longstanding Althouse Principles of the Bloggable.

"How about a friendly kiss goodbye"... to Larry Hagman.

A great clip reel, via Throwing Things.

Exactly what it says it is.

"A dramatic interpretation of Sir Mix-A-Lot's 'Baby Got Back' as if it were performed by actor Sir Ian McKellen."

Via Throwing Things.

It will be the final season for "The Office" — and "all questions will be answered."

Including who's been making the documentary. Who are the people on the other side of the fictional camera that the characters have been talking to all these years? And why would any documentary about a relatively dull and unimportant office keep filming and filming for 9 years?

The news has no impact on the possible Dwight-centric spin-off The Farm, which will be introduced in an episode of The Office to air this fall.

Via Throwing Things, which says "Do we care about Schrute Farms, which is apparently going to make its first appearance as a backdoor pilot during this season?" and which also notes:

Starting next January, ABC is flip-flopping Nightline and Jimmy Kimmel Live, with Kimmel going head to head with Letterman and Leno.  I'm not a huge Kimmel fan, but will be interesting to see how folks respond to a younger option in the timeslot.

I think it says something about American politics that the run-up to a presidential election seemed like the right time to make it harder to watch the serious news analysis show. (Cue the comments that Nightline is more comedy that Kimmel could ever hope to be.)

"The film 'Fast Times at Ridgemont High' was released 30 years ago today..."

"... and if there's a better line reading in the history of American cinema than Sean Penn's 'You dick' to Mr. Hand, I don't think I know it."

Says Throwing Things.

"For those who insist they've located the least essential, or least sport-y Olympic discipline..."

"... may I present — via Kon Ichikawa's essential 1965 documentary Tokyo Olympiad — 50 kilometer Olympic race-walking?"



Wait! That was grueling. And in the rain? And wearing a straw fedora?

ADDED: Here's the Ichikawa movie. And here's a straw fedora.

"Kill this portmanteau now..."

"... Breastaurant."

ADDED: At the link at the link, there's talk of Tilted Kilt, whose CEO Rod Lynch who complains that the word breastaurant "implies that the company's success is based purely on sex appeal."

Rose Dimov, a 22-year-old waitress at Tilted Kilt, says her job is no different from any other waitressing gig; make guests feel special and ensure they have a good time. As an aspiring ballroom dancer, she also says she's not fazed by the revealing outfit that comes with the job. "Going to a restaurant should be an experience," Dimov says. "We're entertainers."

Tilted Kilt — yes, we were talking about kilts yesterday, but remember when Tilted Kilt popped up in the Wisconsin protest story?  Here's a Business Insider article from February 18, 2011.

"F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury, the greatest sci-fi writer in history..."

F*ck Me, Ray Bradbury - watch more funny videos

Some people really love reading.

Via The Pathetic Earthling.

Spelling time again.

The best blog coverage, year after year, is at Throwing Things.

ADDED: "doo buh TAHN tay: The attitude of the Montana Supreme Court towards Citizens United."

ALSO: Here's some detail about that Montana case, from George Will.

Three Montana corporations sued to bring the state into conformity with Citizens United by overturning a 100-year-old state law, passed when copper and other corporations supposedly held sway, that bans all corporate political spending. The state’s Supreme Court refused to do this, citing Montana’s supposedly unique susceptibility to corporate domination — an idea amusingly discordant with the three corporations’ failure even to persuade the state court to acknowledge the supremacy of the U.S. Supreme Court.

"Irving Berlin said, 'Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.'"

"That doesn't mean it's good or bad – that's the equivalent of arguing the merits of hot dogs versus hamburgers. What the hell difference does it make?"

(Via Throwing Things.)

"The Free Library of Philadelphia is hosting speed-dating sessions where each potential suitor has to bring a representative book as an icebreaker..."

"... and we couldn't help but wonder: if you were (or are) on the market, which book would you bring to introduce yourself?  And which book, in the hands of the person across the table, would have you wincing and hoping for the next rotation to happen quickly?"

I'd bring "Get Me a Table Without Flies, Harry."

As for the books that would be off-putting in the other person's hands... there are so many things. The first thing that pops into my head is: astrology. But you don't need to go to a special library-sponsored book-in-hand dating event for would-be suitors to disqualify themselves with astrology.

"Possibly the biggest gap between how much I loved it as a kid, and how unwatchable I'd find it now of any show."

From a discussion of "Welcome Back Kotter," on the occasion of the death of actor Robert Hegyes (who played Epstein).

On his website, Hegyes wrote that he modeled the swaggering, skirt-chasing Epstein after Chico Marx, whom he played in a national touring production of "A Night With Groucho." He was a big fan of the Marx Brothers: "They were immigrant Jews, and I was an immigrant Italian. Groucho, Harpo, Chico, Gummo, and Zeppo were intellectuals ... They all played the piano and took music lessons, and they were all juvenile delinquents; I could definitely relate."

It's sweet to see that connection to the Marx Brothers tradition of ethnic characters played by actors whose own ethnicity is at odds with the character's ethnicity. Heyges came from Hungarian and Italian ancestry and the Epstein character was Jewish and Puerto Rican.

"Welcome Back Kotter" wasn't a show I watched. I was in my 20s in the 1970s, and didn't watch much TV in those years. It's the TV shows of the 50s and 60s that are seared into my memory. Are there shows that I truly loved that I'd find really unwatchable now? Maybe "The Red Skelton Show."