Here’s a fun little game to help pass the time on the first-day-back-from-a-long-weekend: The Retail Alphabet Game. Simply look at each letter and determine whose logo it belongs in.

I think it’s pretty frightening that I could identify almost all of them on my own…

I was gonna write up a piece about REVENGE OF THE SITH and what I thought (short version: GLEE!), but Steve Pheley apparently read my mind and wrote it for me; so, thanks, pal.

“Developing”, as Drudge would say.

UPDATE 5/26/05: I forgot to also link over to Jeremy’s thoughts, mostly because doing so requires me to think about the movie more than I think I’m prepared to do. I’ve now seen the EPISODE III-as-political-criticism meme in too many places to dismiss it outright, but it strikes me as an awful lot like putting a pig in a dress. Sure, you can do it, and it might even be very pretty and charming, but at the end of the day it’s still a pig. We all see what we want to see; methinks those who are calling “foul” (or “bravo”) on Lucas for the inclusion of such “pointed criticism” doth protest too much.

And moreover, if you really believe that Lucas (and/or Tom Stoppard) actually intended REVENGE OF THE SITH (and indeed, the entire prequel trilogy) to be a modern political allegory and had put that much thought into crafting it as such, don’t you also think that the same or equivalent effort would have gone into the first two?

Although I’ve apparently missed the first two days of the three-day event, KenJen’s back on JEOPARDY! for the Ultimate Tournament of Champions finals tonight. Rock!

Actor Frank Gorshin, the impressionist with 100 faces best known for his Emmy-nominated role as The Riddler on the old “Batman” television series, has died. He was 72.

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Apparently, his last appearance will be on tomorrow’s CSI finale.

Continuing in my week (life?) of irredeemable geekery: ENTERPRISE ended last week. I watched it. The last, last, last STAR TREK episode for (probably) a good long while. It wasn’t good, and if I were the cast, I’d be pissed, since the entire “finale” was framed as a holodeck diversion for Riker during an episode of NEXT GENERATION.

Really. As in, they took one of the stories they’d done fifteen years ago, brought back Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis in fifteen-year-old costumes, rebuilt fifteen-year-old NEXT GEN sets, and shot the “new” scenes to conform with things that had happened in that old show. So now, when you watch that old episode of NEXT GEN, you can think to yourself, “Hey, this is the point where Riker goes and pretends to be the chef on ENTERPRISE.” Which, y’know, is cute, but seems kind of like a slap in the face for the current show.

Anyhoo. I gave up watching ENTERPRISE long ago; I’d come back to it every now and then, just for the hell of it, but never for good. Like VOYAGER before it, there was something so… bland?… about it that you just kind of lost interest. (Sacrilege to my inner fifteen-year-old, I suppose, but them’s the breaks.) So it was mostly out of a sense of duty that I caught the finale — it’s the last one, they aren’t doing any more, how can you not watch, yadda yadda. Too bad it stunk.

The reason I bring all of this up is to link you to this absolutely marvelous and very funny appreciation of ENTERPRISE and STAR TREK itself from James Lileks — which I found at, of all places, Volokh. Of course, Lileks says the opposite of pretty much everything I just said, but that doesn’t make it any less worth reading — his is much better, actually. But don’t take my word for it; go see for yourself.