Best Be Moving Along Now!

It's that time of year again, the time when I suddenly remember, "Hey, we have a blog!" and "Oh yeah, the stupid Academy Awards are this weekend, and I haven't mocked it once yet!"

Fortunately for you, devoted reader (because there's only one of you), my OCD will not let me go a year without maintaining this, my annual ritual of confusing people who drunkenly Google about movies. Years from now, I'll be on my deathbed, struggling for my final breaths, and quietly whispering into my loved ones' ears, "Did I remember to mock the fact that Frozen 7 got nominated this year?"

There's a wide variety of cinematic selections on display among the Best Picture nominees this year, mostly because you can't help but have variety when you've nominated an absurdly high eight films. (Editor: They nominated nine last year.) Yes, but some of those were good films.₁

Anyway, roll film, as they say... or digital, or whatever the hell it is these days...

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A Star Is Born

Bradley Cooper's directorial debut treks the well worn path of cinematic iconoclast (or what producers call "cranks") Terence Malick in this dynamic tale of the birth of the star Sirius (Lady Gaga), symbolically depicted as the rising career of a pop music entertainer with a predilection for food-themed outfits.

Ally Sirius Campana, a struggling singer, runs into a big country music star named Sirius B. Maine one evening at a rather unique drag bar (cross-dressing funny car drivers). They quickly fall in love and have a lot of hot duet scenes under even hotter lights, with roadies fanning stage smoke across their sweaty, denim-covered bodies. The 20 minute scene where Ally pulls off Sirius's left boot while the band plays the extended guitar solo from Freebird is particularly salacious.

Even more impressive is the way the smoke (hickory) cures Ally's suit of bacon.

(While I know our astronomy buffs, even Neil De Grasse Tyson, can already see where this is going, please bear with me for the sake of our normal readers.)

Soon, it becomes clear that Ally's career is rising into the entertainment stratosphere like a brand new Vought Corsair, while Sirius's is spiraling in the opposite direction, like a not-so-new Vought Corsair whose propeller has fallen off.

Sirius takes to drinking, smoking, and other reckless behavior (handling angry cats) in a failed attempt to come to grips with their disparate fortunes. Eventually, he is reduced to doing intros for Sunday Night Football, and commercials for the General auto insurance, but even those indignities pale in comparison to the moment Dolly Parton mistakes him for Ryan Reynolds (an ad-lib by Parton, who didn't realize they were rolling).

On the other hand, Ally's fortunes take her to the Grammys, the Oscars, and even the rarefied air of the Kids' Choice Awards (where she is proclaimed "Queen of All that is Awesome Dude"). She never forgets Sirius though, as he is now her shoe butler. Cooper renders this final, tender scene as a lengthy zoom shot of a giant burning shoe orbiting around the star Sirius.

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BlacKkKlansman

Spike Lee's riveting story (20 minutes of the film is a documentary about steel building construction) about an African-American police officer who goes undercover to join the Ku Klux Klan.

John Stallworth is an African-American police officer (or didn't you read the previous paragraph) who is investigating terrorist activity by the KKK. One day, he is cornered by angry (and stupid, which should go without saying) Klan members. Unable to escape, he accidentally falls into a vat of talcum powder and emerges, just as the Klan members catch up to him. Covered with the talcum powder, the Klan members mistake him for white and make him their Imperial Grand Wizard Dragon Vizier Poobah because he's whiter and smarter than all of them combined.

Stallworth uses this opportunity to probe the organization about their upcoming plans and learns they are preparing to attack a civil rights rally by dropping a 10,000 lb. bomb from the bottom of a Vought Corsair. Realizing the bomb is far too large for the plane, Stallworth allows the plot to go forward, which results in the Klan pilot blowing himself into a 1,000 pieces on takeoff. (Think of the Death Star at the end of several Star Wars films.)

The Klan's next 37 plots see similar results. Their plan to unleash a ravenous tiger in a multi-racial crowd fails when the three Klansmen who try to steal it from the zoo are savaged, because the tiger mistook their robes for a giant chicken. Their plan to lob grenades into a parade from a helicopter fails when the person handling the grenades counts to three by using Mississippis. (Also, they get stuck in his robe.) Their plan to roll a steamroller into a black church fails when they leave the steamroller in gear and their robes get caught underneath it (17 Klansmen are killed in this scene alone). Etc. etc...

Stallworth is finally able to arrest the two surviving Klansmen and their co-conspirators in the police department when he convinces them to walk into a jail cell disguised as a strip club.

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Black Panther

Marvel Studios finally brings to vivid cinematic life it's first and most famous African superhero. T'Challa (Scarlett Johansson)... (Just kidding! It's James Earl Jones) is a prince of the majestic hidden nation of Wakanda who must rise to the level of king when his father (Eddie Murphy) is killed by horde of angry ants, upset that they were left out of the Ant Man films.

T'Challa takes on the mantle of the Black Panther, the legendary, super-powered defender of Wakanda (and not Huey Newton's grandson, President Trump), in order to lead the nation and investigate his father's death. Soon, he finds himself hot on the trail of a Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson), until he realizes he's wandered into the wrong film. He then takes a Vought Corsair (Stan Lee) back to the right film, only to find out that Wakanda has been taken over by Aquaman (Jason Momoa), who quickly realizes he's in the wrong film, and, after a lengthy apology and a fairly protracted arbitration between Marvel and DC Comics, muscles his way back to the famous water tower at Warner Bros., where they filmed most of his underwater scenes.

After this, the story (Academy Award Winner Mahershala Ali) gets really confusing, due to the fact this thing was largely plotted by comic book writers. T'Challa loses his powers, gets them back, dies four times, does a crossover series with Dr. Strange (Randy Quaid) and finally reclaims his throne back from a Dr. Evil (Albert Finney, in his final role). He also marries and divorces Mary Jane Watson, but who in a Marvel Comic hasn't?

Under T'Challa's beneficent rule, Wakanda can return to its primary economic activities: Hiding Vibranium from the world and selling Black Panther merchandise (Scarlett Johansson) to Amazon Prime customers (Stew Miller).

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Bohemian Rhapsody

A literal depiction of the famous Queen song, the film begins with a guy (Rami Malek) confused about real life and fantasy, who spends the next 35 minutes complaining to his mom (Raquel Welch) about it, along with the spree killing he committed a few moments ago. It's at this point the audience (Gene Shalit) realizes this guy might be smoking some of the reefer.

He turns away from this domestic clustersquawk to assist famed astronomer Galileo (Jerry Lewis, in his final role) on an experiment involving electricity, lightning, and comic Italian dancing of the commedia dell'arte period. The highlight of this scene is when he is frightened by his shadow (Ellen Degeneres), causing the experiment to catastrophically fail, to which Galileo exclaims, "FLAAAVEN!"

The guy tries to flee his shadow, but is held in place by a crowd of choral singers (The Manhattan Transfer) who refuse to let him go until he explains his relationship to the devil (Bryan Singer) and also what the heck "Bismillah" means.

Unfortunately, all of the singing involved results in an excessive amount of spit (Kevin Spacey) being flung into the guy's eyes. This infuriates him, and he rips off his shirt, swings about his mic stand (striking Dr. Brian May right in the plectrum), and leaves his baby (a vintage Vought Corsair XF4U-4) to follow the wind (Saoirse Ronan) wherever it goes.

He then comes back out to roaring applause and does Fat Bottomed Girls as an encore.

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The Favourite

The wacky story of Queen Anne and the rivals for her courtly affections.

Queen Anne (Gary Oldman, in a tour de force performance) is the ruler of the British Empire and has an obsessive mania for horse racing. (Her bookie is composer George Handel.) Depressed by her inability to correctly rate horse flesh (beyond spotting it in dodgy royal meals), she turns to making her ladies in waiting race one another across the gardens of Windsor.

Sarah Churchill (Cher) is rated the Queen's favourite, mostly because she gets 3-2 odds for every race. However, Abigail Hill (Dame Judy Dench) is a terrific mudder, and, after paying off 15-1 during a St. Crispin's Day downpour, AND, given that they are in England, where rain is as common as syphilis in the early 18th century, she quickly gains the Queen's favor, or as the English say, "favour."

Much plotting and scheming and weighing of jockeys (Elijah Wood and Tobey Maguire) ensues, and finally, after having the umpteenth bucket of troth water dumped on her head from buckets perched above doorways (the plotting and scheming being of a particularly low variety), Queen Anne decides to settle the whole thing by having Sarah and Abigail race across the English Channel.

Two centuries later, after Sarah and Abigail's drownings, the British government (Ralph Fiennes) issues a half-hearted apology to their families and names a Vought Corsair in their honor. The film ends with the RAF Horse's Ass flying off into the distance.

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Green Book

This is the story of the publication of Monty Python's Big Red Book (which is blue in real life, but is violet in this film, because blue and green messed with the digital effects and caused all the books to look like Terry Jones's buttocks in the extended dream sequence).

Famous classical and jazz pianist Don Shirley (Academy Award Winner Mahershala Ali) is traveling the southern United States in the dark, oppressive era of segregation, looking for places to stay and eat. He hires a driver named Tony Vallelonga (Viggo Mortenson) to fly him by Vought Corsair from place to place. This proves impractical, as Tony does not have a pilot's license, but does have a pathological fear of heights (developed after reading the plot of Vertigo in a Wall Street Journal film review while being thrown into a ravine).

After selling the Vought Corsair to Elvis (Andy Kaufman), Shirley and Vallelonga travel the country by car (the Batmobile). They have many remarkable and improbable adventures together. At one point they nearly invent the "Surely you can't be serious" routine, except that Don keeps responding, "Well, my name is Shirley."

Eventually, they run into a very young John Cleese (Eddie Redmayne), who admires the Green Book that Shirley uses to locate hospitable accommodations on their travels. Cleese vows to use that experience in a joke someday, but notes he has a terrible memory for colors, and the film ends with all of them laughing in freeze frame.

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Roma

Roma is director Alfonso Cuaron's deeply personal ode to his favorite variety of tomato (or as the British say, tomato). "They look like plump little red sausages!" he would squeal during the press junkets for the film.

He even had 40,000 of them dropped from an airplane (a Vought Corsair, natch) at the premiere. It looked like the conclusion of a Brian De Palma film.

Anyway, there are a lot of tomatoes in the film, so many that it really obscures the plot (ostensibly the rise and fall of a 1930's Mexican gangster with a massive Jones for pico de gallo, but really a wistful reboot of Attack of the Killer Tomatoes).

There's also a great deal of romance in the film, with everyone calling each other, "My saucy little tomato!"

The film ends with a whole lot of tomatoes blowing up in slow motion, which Cuaron says was inspired by the conclusion of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriske Point, as well as a YouTube video of guys shooting up jars of Ragu spaghetti sauce.

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Vice

Christian Bale (or possibly Jim Carrey... it's hard to tell at times) plays Vice President Dick Cheney. Cheney is selected by President George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell or possibly Rich Little) to be his Vice President. After winning a contentious election in 2000 (2016 or possibly 1960), and facing the crisis of 9/11, Cheney decides to expand the role of Vice President in the U.S. government from its traditional conception of Presidential shoe polisher. (He is finally sent over the edge by Bush telling him to, "Wax my spats, Dicko!")

Cheney's controversial actions make many people mad and others happy, depending on their politics. At one point Cheney shoots one of his hunting buddies in the face with a shotgun, exclaiming, "I'm so sorry! I thought you were a basket of puppies," after which the screenwriter (John Doe, possibly Allen Smithee) is replaced with someone who takes their job a little more seriously.

Cheney is then proclaimed king for life, demanding that Prime Minister Tony Blair (whoever is hosting the Oscars this year) to kiss his boots, after which the screenwriter is rapidly replaced again.

The third choice satisfactorily changes Cheney's remaining dialogue to lines from Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. (The scene where Cheney tells Donald Rumsfeld [himself], "Swear to me!" is particularly droll.)

The stress of being Vice-President eventually catches up to Cheney, causing serious heart problems and also his heavy makeup to melt into goo.

In the end, Bush and Cheney's terms end, and they both fly away from Washington in a Vought Corsair F4U that is plastered with Haliburton logos, arguing the whole way over who has control of the joystick. A big chyron, which reads "SATIRE" runs across the bottom (Cheney's).

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1 - There are no footnotes this year. Tough.

The Bestest Best Bestity Oscar Bestness

The Oscars are Sunday. Already, actors and actresses are getting fitted for their designer clothes and/or eggs. Journalists who cover the celebrity beat are already doing their lip and tongue exercises to prepare for the massive amounts of butt-kissing and boot-licking they'll dish out on the red carpet. Nominees are crafting moving, poetic lines of thanks, which they will forget to read if they win, choosing instead to rely on rambling improvisation and copious waterworks.*

And don't forget those unforgettable Oscar musical numbers. Remember last year when Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin did that number with the thing, and there was that other thing. Or was that Steve and Whoopi? Or did Jon Stewart do that bit with the thing? Still, I'll never forget Snow White and whatshisname!

The important thing is that the Academy has named their ten nominees for Best Picture, and you can count on us to give you the run down on all of them. So, without further ado (which is Latin for "lame jokes"), here are your Oscar Best Picture nominees!

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Black Swan - In this surreal documentary about the cutthroat, perversely sexual, remarkably nude world of professional ballet, Natilie Portman plays a determined ballerina who has a serious Jones for her stuffed black swan doll. She carries it everywhere, including public restrooms, which means that it needs to be laundered quite a bit. Unfortunately, while "Swanniekins" is in the dryer, our little toe dancer gets a bit, well... psychotic. (Think Linus without his blanket, on meth.) She goes so nuts that while watching Carrie on Netflix, Carrie actually looks at her from the TV and says, "You are a freakin' nutcase, sister." Ironically, Carrie from Sex in the City only suggests that she use a more trendy contraceptive.

Anyway, after killing 17 audience members with a thrilling grand rond de jambe, the SWAT team chases her from the Lincoln Center to an abandoned runway in Jersey. They finally talk her out of setting off the nuclear bomb she has hidden in her leotard by providing her with a fresh-smelling Swanniekins. Unfortunately for our agile little nutjob, Swanniekins is swept into the propeller of a nearby taxiing Vought Corsair. Enraged, the ballerina attacks the plane, which as any schoolchild knows is a terrible mistake, and indeed, she is quickly finished off by the 12.7 millimeter M2 Browning machine guns.

The film ends with her incredible death scene, which rather than being graceful and poignant, instead involves a great deal of splatter, flying shell casings, and floating toy stuffing.

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The Fighter - At last Hollywood deigns to make a film about the legendary Vought F4U Corsair fighter and the tough, gritty Irish-American boxers that flew them.

The year is 1944 and the U.S. Navy is making a big push in the Pacific to put the Japanese Navy on their heels, even though they were fighting at sea. Two young Irish-American brothers, Mickey and Rooney, are pilots on the U.S.S. Hollywood, docked in Tokyo Bay and beating the crap out of Emperor Hirohito's summer palace.

In-between attacks on Hirohito's jacuzzi, fending off kamikazes with a fire hose, and the occasional fly by from Rodan, the brothers are competing for the ship boxing title. Unfortunately, Rooney suffers a debilitating brain injury when he makes the tactical pugilistic mistake of leading with his brain.
To honor his brother, Mickey vows to win the ship tourney and to also personally blow up Tojo's home gazebo.

He does this, in the film's climax, raining hell on the imported Mongolian grill and French bench seats with the Brazilian Rosewood trim.

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Inception - The mystifying story of an espionage team that uses a variety of psychological tricks and strategies to get something or other done to somebody.
 Hell, I don't know. I saw it seventeen times and I'm not even sure who's in the film. Probably Keanu Reeves, Angelina Jolie, and whatnot. Inception sounds a lot like "conception," so we figure these lowlifes are just trying to get some poor gal knocked up against her will.

Anyway, people walk around on the ceiling (far less gracefully than Fred Astaire, if you ask me), get into a lot of slow-motion wire fights, drive a van pretty much everywhere except the road (at one point they make a three-point turn on the wing of a Vought Corsair), and enough buildings turn inside out to justify bringing back "Sensurround.^TM"

Anyway, the two hippies who were in the theater with me loved it. They also went through about 40 containers of popcorn per showing.

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The Kids Are All Right - Ever wonder what that Who song was about? Me too. When I was a kid, I would sit up at nights looking through microfiche of old Rolling Stones magazines for clues in the personals ads. I read the unauthorized autobiography of Pete Townshend (This Windmill Is Out of Control) 30 times looking for a hidden code about the song. The closest I got were the phrases "Kid all must destroy guitar, right?" and "Bite me, Paul and John."

Anyway, I watched Tommy and Quadrophenia several times, which was a waste of time because the song doesn't appear in either of the films. I wrote Roger Daltrey but only got a signed photograph with the inscription "You ask too many damn questions, lad."

32 documentaries, Dick Clark's secret memoirs, the Oxford Dictionary of Music, and one rambling conversation with Keith Moon's poodle Frenchy later I was still no closer to understanding the mystery of this great song. Finally though, I had a chance meeting with John Entwhistle at a Roy Rogers Restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia. As I was piling pickles and onions on to my combo burger, he looked me in the eye, and in a hushed and reverent tone, said "Could you slide down a bit so I can get some mustard, please?"

He then explained that the song was, "about this guy and his girl, and their friends, y'know?"

I don't think the film gets the song at all. It does contain an outstanding wide shot of a Vought Corsair, though.

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The King's Speech - This film is the story of the famous speech that HRH King George VI opf the United Kingdom made at the outset of World War II. Amazingly, the film manages to drag out the speech, which only lasted five minutes and 44 seconds in real life, to over two hours.

This astonishing feat is accomplished in several ways. First, there's a lot of slow motion of Colin Firth talking. While the ladies may love that sort of thing, it was more than a bit tedious for us guys, especially the 'plosives.

Also, the king drinks an incredible amount of water during the speech. At one point, every other word, he's reaching for the glass and having a long sip. He also excuses himself to the loo five times, which is not in the actual recording. (I'm assuming they edited that out of the recording because bathroom talk doesn't fit royal protocol.) He then takes a lengthy smoke break, during which he tours London in a Vought Corsair.

There's also a fist fight with Hitler. The film makes the circumstances of the fight somewhat obscure, but at some point, as the king is refilling his glass, Hitler breaks a chair over his head. Our hero the king quickly shakes this off and body slams Hitler unto a radio dramatic control panel. Eventually, the fight proceeds to the top of Big Ben, where the king cleverly pinches Hitler's mustache between the clock face hands.  After Hitler mysteriously escapes, the king finishes his speech and breaks out into the song that runs during the credits.

Unfortunately, the historical accuracy of the film is severely compromised. The song the king sings is "Swinging on a Star," which wouldn't be written for another five years!

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127 Hours - This film is the awe-inspiring ordeal of a young man who is trapped underneath a rock for 127 hours. Unfortunately, the filmmakers decided to play out the events of the film in real time. For once, Leonard Maltin's description of a film as "overlong" is somewhat justified.

Aside from two very dry sleeping scenes, the film is relatively engaging. There are numerous monologues of quality, and the scene where the young man desperately tries to flag down a search plane (a Vought Corsair, if you must ask) had me weeping into my Raisinettes.

It's all based on a true story, which makes you feel terrible for the person it happened too,  and which is why this particular synopsis is so short on jokes.

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The Social Network - This tawdry melodrama is about the invention of Facebook and the way in which Farmville and Mafia Wars destroyed Western Civilization.

The year is 2003. A young Harvard computer student (Justin Bieber) is sitting in his dorm room, trying to work up the courage to ask out a fiesty Women's Studies major (Alanis Morrisette). While trying to decide whether to take her to Wagamama (Lucy Liu) or an off-Broadway production of The Vagina Monologues (Oprah Winfrey), he accidentally trips over his jumbo-size model of the Battleship Galactica (Paul Williams) and face plants on his Intro to Programming book (Mickey Rooney).

This event, and the painful adjustment to his bridgework (Carl Reiner), causes him to have an ephipany (Julia Roberts), and he immediately began developing the concept of delivering DVD videos by mail. Unfortunately, he discovered that Netflix (Nancy McKeon) had beaten him to the idea by six years. So, he returned to his attempt to woo the Women's Studies major (now played by Betty White).

While booking tickets for Lilith Fair (Tina Fey), he stumbles over a derelict (Gary Busey), and tumbles through the window of a used bookstore (Adam West), planting his pie hole (Tom Brokaw) on a vintage, signed copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philisophicus (will.i.am). This immediately inspired him to create a search engine, which he named "Googing" (Nathan Fillion) He then changed his mind and named it "Bingle" (Vought Corsair). Finally, he realized that search engines had been around for years, and also, that he had a severe concussion (Pauly Shore).

He gives up trying to woo the Women's Studies major (now, Jim Rome) and instead fiddles around and creates an online site where people can incessantly pester people they haven't met in years with requests for farm visits and political diatribes.

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Toy Story 3 - This dark and brooding masterpiece of film noir opens with a tall, lanky cowboy, sitting in his detective agency, spinning a dark narrative of lust, betrayal, and murder.

Only kidding!!! It's another goofy Disney/Pixar comedy about playful toys who can make your heart sing with childlike laughter, and then turn around and wring tears out of your soul like it was a sodden ShamWow.

The plot involves the usual crap about one of the toys getting lost and the other toys violating all the "toy rules" to go and find it in a toy Vought Corsair named "Sammy". There is a surprising amount of gory violence, including a terrifying unstuffing scene, and at least two nude scenes (would someone buy that dinosaur some pants, please!) However, in the end all is well and the toys are safe and sound, except for the villainous toy, which is given the "Braveheart treatment."

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True Grit - The true story of the inventor of hominy grits, this whimsical fable opens with John Wayne traveling back in time (via a Vought Corsair, souped-up with a "time-flux capacitor").  Wayne is returning to the late nineteeth century to head off evil Nazis who have used their own time-machine (a Volkswagen Bug with a beanie propellor) to destroy America from within.

However, the Nazis only succeed in blowing up an outhouse in Fort Smith, Arkansas, which just happened to be occupied by Horace P. Whistletooth, the inventor of the the greatest breakfast cereal stuff ever.** Without grits, American soldiers fighting World War II have become listless and feckless, preferring to sit in their pup tents reading The Great Gatsby aloud, instead of bayoneting Nazis.

Wayne arrives in Fort Smith and manages to trick the Nazis into aggravating judge Issac Parker, the famous "hanging judge," by running over his pet geese with a steam engine. Parker sentences the Nazis to hang for "killin' muh geese" and not being able to pronounce the word "waffle" properly. However, Wayne impatiently shoots the Nazis with a gatling gun.

Later he frees Whistletooth from the outhouse, but in the process gets a bit of grit in his eye, inspiring Horace to create the now famous dish, and forcing Wayne to wear a patch over his eye for his next movie, The Fighting Seabees.

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Winter's Bone - Deep in the heart of the Ozark woods, a young woman finds a bone in a snowman. (A rib bone, gutter minds!) She quickly learns that this bone is special (Shhh!) belonging to former president John F. Kennedy. (Oh, all right! I give up ...go ahead.)

She quickly learns that the bone is really a key to a secret storage facilty that contains her father's worldly belongings: Seven tons of cement, a Bugatti Veyron, a vintage Farrah Fawcett poster (not the one in the bathing suit - she's wearing a monk's robes in this one), a Vought Corsair, 1200 boxes of Pocky, and a twleve foot pile of chicken bones.

She discovers that the chicken bones are actually an immense puzzle that when constructed takes the form of an even larger chicken bone! This puzzles her for months, until her hometown is attacked by a giant chicken! Hundreds of extras are relentlessly pecked until the young woman manages to lure the chicken to the secret storage facility.

At the sight of the gigantic chicken bone, the enormous chicken becomes filled with fear and promises to serve the woman forever, as long as she promises not to kill him "like that other chicken." She agrees and then trains him to run in the Kentucky Derby, the following year. "Old Pecker" wins the race by twelve lengths.***

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* Both tears and other precious bodily fluids.

** Even better than Capt. Crunch and miles above Cream of Kale

*** I had a whole slew of jokes about randy Eskimos, but the staff vetoed them on moral grounds.

Lunchtime Capsules

No, I'm not eating some sort of space-age nosh shaped like One-A-Days(TM). Rather, I'm sitting here on a frigid day, bundled up like a Sontaran, reviewing the news of the week.

Well, the news I'm interested in, at least.

• Ricardo Montalban has passed on. Whether you knew him as a frequent cast member of MGM musicals, Mr. Rourke from ABC's Fantasy Island, the impossibly charming pitch artist who sold millions of Americans on the virtues of Corinthian leather (and to a lesser extent, the Chrysler Cordoba), Senor Senor from Kim Possible, the really cool villian (Vincent Ludwig) from the funniest of the The Naked Gun movies, or "Khhhhhhan!" from Star Trek (series and film), he left a stylish, indelible mark on whatever he did. He radiated class the way plutonium radiates... well, radiation. Even when he was playing a villian, you couldn't help but admire the graceful and congenial way in which he had things blown to bits.
  
  Also, let's face it, if the muscles he dispalyed in his sixties in Wrath of Khan were real, and from all reports they were, the bloke was ripped. ...Hope for us all in our golden years, eh? Well, maybe you.
  
  He will be missed.
  
• Football/Soccer officials are concerned that some Brasilian clubs will be using Viagra to improve their players performance on the field. One consolation for sports officials is that the violators will be quite easy to spot.
  
• The mayor of Pittsburg, Pennsylvania has offered proof that he is totally mental for the Steelers by officially changing his name from "Luke R. Ravenstahl" to "Luke R. Steelerstahl." The change is only temporary, while the Steelers are playing the Baltimore Ravens in the NFL playoffs. Get it? "Raven"stahl to "Steeler"stahl? I'm just as amused as you are, perhaps even less so.
  
  Apparently, he has a history of sudden, whimsical nom de plume alterations. In 1977, he changed his name to "Luke R. Skywalker" in honor of Star Wars. Then, in 1979, he was taken with the CBS programme The Dukes of Hazzard and changed his name to Bo and Luke R. Dukenstahl. In the eighties he fell in love with the programme The A-Team and changed his name to Luke R. Baracusstahl. This particular change was accompanied by a sudden scarcity of chains and neck jewelry in the Pittsburg area as the future mayor bought up everything in sight.
  
  The nineties was a quiet period where he simply went by the moniker "the artist previously known as Luke," but he welcomed the Millenium with a sudden change to "Luke R. Y2Kenstahl" and then, on January 2, 2000, "Luke R. Veryrelievedenstahl."
  
  Now this. Well, given the man's apparent loathing for the Baltimore NFL franchise, he can't very well go back to "Ravenstahl" if Pittsburgh loses. Luke R. "Loserstahl" has a nice ring to it, don't you think? ...at least until next season.
  
• The U.S. Academy of Motion Pictures and Science has decided to spice up the awards by not revealing in advance which A-list celebrities will be the awards presenters at the Oscars. This now guarantees that 100% of viewers will have no clue as to who is presenting, which is a drastic increase from the 97.4% who couldn't give a flip in previous years. (That's an average by the way.) The suspense is not exactly killing us.