"I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA. I DON'T LIKE THEM. I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA." Does Texas Rangers slugger Carl Everett like the media? Read this interview with the Dallas Observer and find out just how angry one dinosaur-doubter can get.

Indeed, one might turn on the media after being quoted like this by Sports Illustrated back in 2000:

"God created the sun, the stars, the heavens and the earth, and then made Adam and Eve," Everett said last Friday, before the Red Sox lost two of three in Atlanta. "The Bible never says anything about dinosaurs. You can't say there were dinosaurs when you never saw them. Someone actually saw Adam and Eve. No one ever saw a Tyrannosaurus rex."

What about dinosaur bones?

"Made by man," he says.

Everett has trouble, too, with the idea of man actually walking on the moon. After first rejecting the notion, he concedes, "Yeah, that could have happened. It's possible. That is something you could prove. You can't prove dinosaurs ever existed. I feel it's far-fetched."

Obviously, Mr. Everett is not familiar with the work of Was (Not Was).

DADDY, WHERE DO PÖANGS COME FROM? I was recently referred to an excellent article in Business 2.0 Magazine on Swedish furniture retail giant Ikea -- just what is their secret? Lisa Margonelli explains the product design strategy:

After receiving a new set of instructions, [product developer Per] Carlsson strolls up to the showroom on the third floor of Ikea's headquarters, where each of the company's kitchen items is marked with a large red-and-yellow price tag. Then he applies what Ikeans refer to as "the matrix."

Ikea's product managers use a price matrix to identify holes in the company's product lineup -- and how much to charge for a new product. Demonstrating how the matrix works, Carlsson draws a tic-tac-toe grid on a piece of paper, explaining that he can plot the price and style of any Ikea item within it. Ikea has three basic price ranges -- high, medium, and low -- and four basic styles: Scandinavian (sleek wood), modern (minimalist), country (neo-traditional), and young Swede (bare bones). To identify market opportunities, Carlsson takes a product council directive, plots his existing product lineup on the grid, and looks for empty spaces.

You may read the rest of this informative article via this link.

"WHO KNEW THERE WAS A SCREENWRITING CLASS AT BOB JONES UNIVERSITY?" Via the forums at Fametracker.com (thanks, Philyra) comes the standard against all past and future Bringing Down the House reviews will be compared: the Mr. Cranky review.

I encourage you read it in full. It's that good -- angry, funny, and with a great insight into why Steve Martin's character doesn't fall in love with Queen Latifah in the end -- or, at any point:

Here's why the character of Howie Rosenthal (Eugene Levy) exists: Film executives know that white America wouldn't tolerate a romantic relationship between the whitest of white lawyers, Peter Sanderson (Steve Martin), and the blackest of black former prison inmates, Charlene (Queen Latifah). The second Steve Martin put a seriously passionate and romantic lip-lock on Queen Latifah, most white people would run screaming from the theater like they'd been sprayed in the face with oven cleaner. However, it's perfectly okay if the freaky little Jewish guy falls for her, because he's hairy, very weird, and represents only about 8% of the potential market for this film.

Roger Ebert also raises this point, only not as well.

STRAIGHT. TRIPPIN'. BOO! Before continuing this blog's review of the critical digs Bringing Down the House is receiving, candor and my internal sense of objectivity compels me to first note that not all the reviews are negative.

Carrie Rickey of The Philadelphia Inquirer, whose opinions I respect a great deal, says the movie plays with stereotypes without reinforcing them, and calls the movie "a gut-busting, stereotype-busting slapstick comedy, returning Martin to the antic highs of All of Me and The Man With Two Brains and elevating Latifah to goddess status, that is, if we all agree that goddess outranks queen." There are other positive reviews out there, for sure, and let's be clear: Steve Martin is still funny --

-- in general, that is. Just not here. Let's start in our nation's capital, where Rita Kempley of the Washington Post says:

It is the rare film that is capable of offending both Trent Lott and Al Sharpton, but Bringing Down the House gets the job done, and how. An embarrassment for all concerned, this witless, odd-couple comedy slings separate but equal gibes at blacks and whites . . . and still manages to ridicule gays and Hispanics. Why was this picture made?

And what to make of Queen Latifah's involvement in this sorry debacle? Since she has acknowledged cleaning up the crude script, she clearly read the thing and agreed to play a hip-hop Aunt Jemima anyway.

Over to Salon.com, where you'll have to sit through a brief ad to read Charles Taylor write:

Bringing Down the House is for everyone who finds the idea of a white person saying "bitchslapped" hilarious. The movie appears to have been made for an audience that considers the idea of black people terribly exotic. And just who, nowadays, is that, some 30 years after the birth of rap and with hip-hop style everywhere in pop culture? Bringing Down the House seems to be aimed at people who want to consider black style in dress or speech or music some sort of passing fad -- you know, one of those crazy things the kids do before they settle down and start wearing Dockers and listening to Dave Matthews.

Says the Orange County Register:

It's the kind of sitcom-caliber trifle that's designed with only the squarest segments of society in mind - for example, folks who still get a kick out of seeing a middle-age white actor don high-tops and jive like Curtis Blow. . . . The single most astounding thing about Bringing Down the House is that Tim Allen didn't snag this role first.

Michael Medved, of all people, gets all worked up:

Bringing Down the House tries for laughs rather than social commentary, but still unleashes an avalanche of controversial messages, all of them bad. The most offensive aspect of this lame excuse for a comedy involves the most one-dimensional racial stereotyping this side of Birth of a Nation. All black characters happen to be emotional, uneducated, over-sexed, violent, warm-hearted, hip, cool and connected to the criminal underclass. All white characters are uptight, repressed, clumsy, materialistic, shallow, cruel and incurably racist.

To the Las Vegas Mercury:

When the two get together, there's enough bad, sitcomy racial humor to fill 20 seasons of "What's Happening," the difference here being that even Roger and Rerun could generate more laughter than this groaner. . . . It's sort of Planes, Trains and Automobiles meets You've Got Mail meets Sinbad's Houseguest meets dog shit.

The San Francisco Chronicle:

[T]his is strictly formula stuff, made worse by an utterly careless depiction of the characters, whose road to friendship is neither believable nor remotely accounted for. Most of the jokes turn on racial stereotypes, which the movie presents without wit -- and certainly without truth. . . . .. In some early scenes, Charlene [Latifah] is presented as a kind of vulgar beast whose mere presence is considered appalling. The film's pretense may be that it's reproaching white racism, but there are moments here that seem to cross the line -- where Latifah's bigness and blackness are presented as inherently monstrous.

Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times calls the movie "You've Got Bail" and, while loving Queen Latifah's "charisma, wit and independence", notes with regret:

Like the film Housesitter, which also starred Mr. Martin, Bringing Down the House doesn't have the nerve to follow through on what seems like its romantic-comedy setup. Instead, Peter is hung up on his ex-wife, Kate (Jean Smart). In one scene Charlene teaches a drunken Peter to be more of a man — find his inner Treach — and get his ex-wife back. She puts his hand on her breast and the picture becomes a sexual version of a minstrel show. This makes no sense. The movie gropes toward a cheap laugh to shore up its lack of courage.

Finally, AICN really brings down the house here, pleading:

“WHY?” Why Queen Latifah, why?

Sure, Steve Martin I can understand. With his recent string of bad movies it’s obvious that the Three Amigos curse has finally caught up to him as it did Martin Short and Chevy Chase long ago. . . .

But Queen Latifah . . . you?!

Your name means something. You represent strong black women everywhere. Like Ice Cube, you’re much less a good actor as you are a charismatic personality . . . and what a personality, indeed! It garnered you a much-deserved Oscar nomination for your outstanding work in Chicago. Girl, you have arrived!

Which makes this situation all the more baffling. Frankly, Bringing Down the House is a movie I’d be disappointed to know you rented, let alone starred in and executive produced(!!).

I think. . . .that maybe. . . . I don’t really want to know the answer. *sigh*

Considering that there was a Civil War movie with Robert E. Lee as the hero (Gods & Generals) released during Black History Month, I think I might have an answer as to reason Bringing Down the House was released after…

Mercy.

And on that note, let's move on. After all, Gwyneth Paltrow's View From The Top, which finished filming in March 2001 (before Paltrow filmed The Royal Tenenbaums) and was first scheduled for release on April 19, 2002 (then October 2002, then January 2003), is now only weeks away. . . .

"THERE'S NO ROOM FOR SHIRLEY TEMPLE IN A CONCENTRATION CAMP." The 1972 film The Day The Clown Cried holds a special place in my heart, and in the hearts of those thousands of fans worldwide who would rather live in a world where we all could view a drama in which MDA spokesman Jerry Lewis plays an alcoholic clown at Auschwitz whose job it was to lead all the children into the ovens.

(I'll pause a second so that those of you who hadn't heard of this movie before can compose yourselves.)

Instead, because of issues of financing, litigation and, perhaps, taste, the movie has never been released, and sits in a vault at Lewis's home. "Jerry hopes to someday complete the film," his website maintains, "Which remains to this day, a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation."

I won't go into the whole story here -- there is plenty on the web about the movie as-is. Here's one of my favorite articles, for starters, and this website contains copies of the first draft and final script, plus links to other articles on Lewis' opus. Just know this, and it'll tell you enough for now. Harry Shearer, one of the few people to have seen the movie, once said of it:

With most of these kinds of things, you find that the anticipation, or the concept, is better than the thing itself. But seeing this film was really awe-inspiring, in that you are rarely in the presence of a perfect object. This was a perfect object. This movie is so drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy are so wildly misplaced, that you could not, in your fantasy of what it might be like, improve on what it really is. Oh My God! - that's all you can say.

I bring this up today because Lewis is notoriously silent about the movie, ending his cooperation with biographer Shawn Levy after an initial question about the movie. "What sort of sick childhood did you have, or what's missing in your life that you can sit there and ask me things like that?" Lewis responded, and from that point forward, Levy was on his own.

So whenever Lewis ends up discussing it, to me, it's newsworthy. Last Sunday, he did -- well, sorta. From an interview in the Kansas City Star:

Your official Web site, jerrylewiscomedy.com, calls your unreleased film, "The Day the Clown Cried" -- about a clown interred in a German concentration camp during World War II -- "a significant expression of cinematic art, suspended in the abyss of international litigation." Will we ever see it?

That's about the only thing you can mention that I will not talk about.

Why not?

I won't talk about it.

Have you seen Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful"?

They stole the idea. And he's supposed to be the Jerry Lewis of Italy.

Did you like "Life Is Beautiful"?

I thought it was beautifully done.

"One way or another," Lewis has said, "I'll get it done. The picture must be seen, and if by no one else, at least by every kid in the world who's only heard there was such a thing as the Holocaust."

We can only hope.

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY: On March 6, 1983, crowds in Arizona, Denver, Tampa, Washington, and Los Angeles gathered to witness inaugural games in a professional sports league destined to be remembered not so much for its players, not for its impact on the game, but for a check in the amount of $3.76, never cashed, representing the total damages suffered by the league on account of monopolistic practices.

Yes, twenty years ago today, the USFL was born -- home of the Memphis Showboats, Donald Trump, Herschel Walker, Anthony Carter, Kelvin Bryant and the Boston/New Orleans/Portland Breakers; birthplace of the zone blitz and run-and-shoot offense.

The league lasted three seasons before folding after an unfavorable antitrust verdict on July 29, 1986, when a federal jury determined that the NFL did violate antitrust laws in attempting to monopolize the professional football market, but that the damages were limited to one dollar, trebled, plus interest, and not quite the $567,000,000 in damages sought by the USFL.

You can enjoy ESPN's rather extensive coverage today of the twenty-year anniversary by starting here. In addition, there are many USFL fansites on the web, including the freakishly comprehensive ThisIsTheUSFL.com and RememberTheUSFL.

Amazingly, two USFL veterans still remain active players in the NFL. You find out who they are via this link.

THE LEGEND OF BAGGER LATIFAH: I love harsh movie reviews. I've had fun highlighting the critical daggers thrust at The Life of David Gale and Roberto Benigni's Pinocchio, among others, in recent months.

To that list, I've been expecting to add Bringing Down The House, the Steve Martin/Queen Latifah movie debuting this week that, based on the trailer, struck me as being yet another awful Magical Negro Movie.

[You know the genre by now -- movies like Bulworth, The Green Mile, The Family Man, Ghost, Jerry Maguire, Men of Honor, What Dreams May Come and The Legend of Bagger Vance -- movies in which black people with deep spiritual skills have nothing better to do with their lives than help white men with their problems. Of Bagger Vance, Spike Lee has noted: “How is it that when your brothers are being lynched, your sisters are being raped, Jim Crow is at its height in the state of Georgia, how is that the only thing this guy is worried about is teaching Matt Damon a golf swing? Where do they get these people?”]

[For more on the genre, go here.]

"It won't be a bad movie," Jen said to me when I expressed my fears. "Well, it shouldn't." After all, she noted, Steve Martin had a pretty good track record in picking his movies (except for this, this and this, perhaps), and Queen Latifah is really funny, and she wouldn't stand to be in a degrading movie like that.

Unfortunately, it seems, she has. The early reviews are out, and it ain't pretty.

After noting the structural "similarities" between this movie, Martin's Housesitter with Goldie Hawn and the Phil Hartman/Sinbad comedy Houseguest, the Associated Press gets down to business on this "baffling" movie:

[I]t's chock full of outdated racial stereotypes. All the white people are uptight, racist WASPs, all the black people are ghetto fabulous, and none of them resembles a human being. . . .

Despite his initial disdain, Peter [Steve Martin] forms a friendship with this woman, chiefly because she functions as a Magical Black Person — a cinematic character, like Will Smith in The Legend of Bagger Vance and Don Cheadle in The Family Man, who swoops down, solves everyone's problems and provides clarity. . . .

No, this is not funny. And it doesn't get funnier when Peter goes to an all-black nightclub, dressed in baggy clothes with bling-bling draped around his pasty neck, and takes part in a break dancing contest. (This wasn't terribly amusing when Warren Beatty did a similar thing in Bulworth back in 1998, either.)

From the Philadelphia Weekly, still more early warning:

Bringing Down the House is both unbelievably stupid and unbelievably racist, though I'm guessing everybody involved -- from the filmmakers to the stars to the studio execs -- are praying people will dismiss it as the former.

Call it a case of bad timing that Queen Latifah follows up her Oscar-nominated, firing-from-all-cylinders performance in Chicago with this flagrantly unglued race farce. Basically a sitcom pilot stretched out into a 105-minute guffaw-a-thon, House shows white people that if you bring a loud, rambunctious sista into your life, you'll see how much you've been missing out on. . . .

Martin and Latifah do their best to mine raucous laughs out of clashing race relations, but the whole thing just ain't right. Director Adam Shankman goes about the nasty business of making racism and bigotry look, well, cute. But the movie ends up being the kind of insulting Hollywood bullshit comedian Dave Chappelle mercilessly skewers on his new Comedy Central show.

edited to add: The Onion's A.V. Club helpfully jumps onto the pile:

"Dignity... Always dignity," Gene Kelly espoused as his motto in Singin' In The Rain, shortly before a sequence illustrating the depths of humiliation that had made his career. Or, to put it another way, as Steve Martin did on one of his comedy albums: Comedy is not pretty. Which is fine as long as it's funny, but when it's not funny, it's just sad. Falling firmly on the sad side of the equation, Bringing Down The House is yet another comedy that suggests someone should take Martin aside and remind him that he can do better. Suggesting a big-screen version of the Nell Carter sitcom Gimme A Break! . . . . (blah blah blah plot summary) . . . .

To be fair, the movie has a good nature that could allow it to pass as the most enlightened portrayal of race relations of the 19th century. At one point, Martin even suggests that with her intelligence, savvy, quick comprehension, and ability to de-ghettoize her speech, Latifah could someday become a paralegal. Oh, the dizzying heights. "A girl has to get her cheese on," Latifah exclaims at one point, and it's not hard to hear the actress behind the character.

More on Friday.

CALL THE DOCTOR: Neil Patrick Harris -- remembered as TV's "Doogie Howser, M.D." (and for a supporting role in Starship Troopers), is now starring in the musical Cabaret on Broadway as The Emcee, a role previously made famous by Joel Grey and Alan Cumming. You can take a look at sweet little Doogie in full costume and makeup here, but I warn you, it's more than a little distubing.

Starring alongside Harris as the decadent chanteuse Sally Bowles is former teen pop sensation Deborah "Still Electric, But No Longer Youthful" Gibson, who looks so much like Gina Gershon in this picture that it's freaking me out. (Seriously, look at Gershon from her Bowles days here, and you tell me there's a difference.)

But there's one more disturbing image out there: Full House's John Stamos also recently played the Emcee. Parents, please protect your children from this picture. Use force if necessary. I warned you.

NO BABES. NO BOOBS. NO BEADS: You can mark Philadelphia's 2003 Mardi Gras Prevention Program as a success, as the City successfully prevented adventurous suburbanites from ruining my neighborhood. As today's Philadelphia Daily News reports:

South Street never even reached the level of a regular Saturday night. It was largely empty throughout the day, and few of the bars were ever full. Some teens, who in previous years would drink and party all day and night, were out of luck. They drifted aimlessly up and down the street.

"It sucks there's so many cops, but thanks for protecting me," Angelina Guiseppe, 19, said sarcastically. She had been there since about 3:30 p.m., but hadn't been able to get into any bars. She said she would likely head home to Coatesville, Chester County, fast.

VIDEO CLIP OF THE DAY: Available via this link: Lisa Simpson meets the Seven Sisters.

HOW LOW CAN FOX GO? If last night's arranged nuptual debacle wasn't enough, the network that brought you "When Animals Attack", "World’s Scariest Police Chases" and "The Secret Diaries of Desmond Pfeiffer" now brings you this:

Fox Television ordered a pilot for an unscripted dating game show called "Spellbound," which uses hypnosis in its attempts to bring couples together. "This is a dating show where the participants are willingly convinced to believe something other than the truth about the person they are meeting," said [Elizabeth] Murdoch, who is chief executive of Shine and the daughter of News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch.

In the pilot episode, three gorgeous women will vie for the attention of a man who is their perfect match personalitywise, but who is not all that attractive. The women don't realize this, though, because they've been hypnotized into thinking he's a sex idol. At the end of the show, the man has to break the spell and let the women see his true self. Ms. Murdoch said it is "cringe-worthy television, but fantastic, so you can't help but watch it."

Oh, and by the way, why is Frenchie Davis' bio back on the official American Idol site? If this is "the twist", color me thrilled. That said, it looks like she's moving on with her life, and anyway, Fox swears she's not coming back. And we can believe Fox, right?

SLIM WITH THE TILTED BRIM: Staying on top of this story like no other blog, I am happy to report that MTV has decided to add Chino Hills Bulldogs offensive football coach Snoop Dogg's variety show "Doggy Vizzle Televizzle" to its summer lineup this year. Billboard Magazine reports today that the first of six initial episodes will begin airing on Sunday, June 22 at 10pm.

A pilot episode aired in December. Among the skits already taped for the new season is one featuring Snoop working at a pet shop. Hopefully, he kept the dizzoggs in chizzeck.

[What's up with the izzayism? See these two posts on the linguistic phenomenon.]

Next task: decoding the chorus to Missy Elliot's "Gossip Folks".

ILL TUESDAY: Following the debacle that was Mardi Gras 2001 in Philadelphia, today is a day of much anxiousness in the Throwing/Snark household.

Jen and I live less than two blocks off South Street. Back in 2001, we had just moved in to our new house. The bars were open as early as 6am, with crowds of teens and twentysomethings lined up for blocks just to get in, egged on by live radio promotions. Drunks were coming up and down our residential street all day and all night, shouting obscenities, worse than any Mummers Parade, the most shocking being when a woman flashed our rat terrier Wendell when I was walking him at 9 pm. It was loud, unruly and out of control.

Jen, meanwhile, wasn't there. She was on tour in Atlanta that night, and only learned of what was going on through the CNN Airport Network, when she looked up at the monitors, saw the live images from the news helicopters of revellers trying to tip over police vans and yelled, "Wait! That's, like, my house!"

It was bad. Looting of stores, bottle throwing, fights, just a total breakdown of the social order worth of Bill Buford's attention.

Last year, thankfully, wasn't so bad. The city, for once, prepared well. The police came out in force and "managed hell", as they put it. "It's like Gestapo City," said a reveler named Mo from Fishtown. Besides just coming out in full force and scaring the fun out of people, the police decided to arrest people for such (legitimate) crimes as selling beads without a permit. Heh.

And the Honorable Judge Seamus McCaffery, long a favorite of this page, presided over Drunk Court that night, dispensing his wisdom in his typical style:

Continuing a new Mardi Gras tradition, suspects found themselves in front of Municipal Judge Seamus McCaffery of Eagles Court fame. Again this year he chastised young women for exposing their breasts -- "One came all the way up from Maryland for this. I asked her why she just didn't do it in her hometown and she told me nobody wants to see them there."

So, what's in store for 2003? The local bars have agreed not to open until 10am, and will close at 7pm. The police were already on the street when I headed in for work this morning. Everyone's trying to cooperate, in the hopes that another peaceful Mardi Gras will make South Street safe for yuppies again.

I don't know that I really want that. I like our mix of tattoo parlors, pizza joints, flower shops and BYOBs. I don't need a Restoration Hardware in my funky little 'hood. Just make it safe for our little rat dog, so I don't have to cover his eyes anymore. That's all I ask.

THE LIFE OF DAVID GALE, PT II: Thanks to my earlier post on this apparently dreadful film, a number of people have been coming to this website looking for spoilers to the allegedly atrocious ending.

Today, thanks to Slate's David Edelstein, I'm happy to oblige. Here's how the story ends (highlight area to reveal):

[SPOILER]There is really no way to address the larger insanity of The Life of David Gale without giving away the surprise ending—a surprise only by virtue of its idiocy. Fair warning? Here goes: The nerdy professor (Laura Linney) was dying of leukemia anyway, so she and the Cowboy and David Gale rigged her kinky rape and murder to make Gale into a death-penalty martyr. When the truth is revealed to her, Bitsy does not say, "What a bunch of fruitcakes." Her eyes fill with tears at the noble logic of it all.[/SPOILER]

Yikes. That's bad. Edelstein's full review is available here, including this further trashing of director Alan Parker:

Parker has been responsible for some of the worst cinematic battering-rams of our time: After Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994), which belongs in some special circle of hell, I can think of no more contemptible piece of filmmaking than Parker's self-proclaimed tribute to the Civil Rights movement, Mississippi Burning (1988). Forget — if you can — that the African-Americans were pushed off to the sidelines to make way for the white FBI heroes. The more philosophical outrage was that Parker took the most successful non-violent resistance movement since Gandhi and made it fodder for a vigilante movie — a coarse, thumping melodrama about the ways in which noble ends justify barbaric means.

NO WHAMMY, NO WHAMMY, BIG BUCKS, BIG BUCKS, AND NO STOP: Set your VCRs, fire up the TiVo.

On Wednesday, March 16, from 9-11p eastern, the Game Show Network presents BIG BUCKS: The Press Your Luck Scandal, a documentary tribute to Michael Larson, a true hero of our age.

For those who don't remember the show, Press Your Luck was a game show based on a wall of flashing TV screens which featured money in dollar amounts, prizes and the dreaded cartoon Whammy. On each "spin", contestants stopped the flashing sequence and “landed” on a spot on the screen. Land on a prize, win the prize; land on a Whammy, and a mischevious cartoon would erase your winnings. Some prizes also included a free additional spin -- valuable if you could use it wisely, but also one more chance to lose it all on a Whammy.

Larson, an unemployed ice cream truck driver from Ohio, figured out that there were only six sequences for how the Whammys and lights moved around the board. Armed with this knowledge, he headed to California to become a contestant. He was selected for the show, and found out he was right. Larson successfully completed 40 consecutive spins without a Whammy, winning an astonishing $102,000 (and largely in cash) before surrendering his remaining spins to his foes.

In the end, Larson won the game and left with $110,237, with over $100,000 of it in cash, more in one episode than anyone had achieved in a five-episode run (as most winners walked away with around $10,000). The producers realized that someone was amiss, but also determined that Larson had done nothing illegal. Larson was allowed to keep his money, but was not invited back the next day to defend his title.

The producers immediately introduced 16 more random sequences into the mix to foil future Larsons. The episodes only aired once. Larson died of cancer in 1999, having spent all his winnings within two years.

As part of the March 16, celebration, Larson's original co-contestants, Ed Longoff and Janie Dakan, will be facing off against Larson's brother in a rematch (of sorts). In the meantime, way more than you'd ever want to know about Press Your Luck is located at Game Show Central, including a play-by-play of Larson's triumph, including video footage.

"IS THAT A DAGGER I SEE BEFORE ME, OR A PIZZA? MMMM....PIZZA...." If Rick Miller's MacHomer is coming to a city near you anytime in the future, run, don't walk, and go see it.

One man. Voicing fifty Simpsons characters. Doing the Scottish play. It's hysterical. Jen and I had a great time -- Homer as MacHomer (Thane of Glamis and Cawdor) with Marge as Lady MacHomer, Barney as MacDuff, Burns and Smithers as King Duncan and Prince Malcolm (his "son") and the rest of your Simpsons favorites, featuring Troy McClure (whom you may remember from such educational films as "Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun" and "Firecrackers: The Silent Killer") as The Worthy Thane of Ross. It's smart, funny and just plain rocks.

You can catch video highlights of Miller's performance via this link.