ONLY SLIGHTLY LESS LEGITIMATE THAN THE GOLDEN GLOBES: In addition to Shawn Michaels, the WWE Hall of Fame this year will induct Hacksaw Jim Duggan, a man whose loquacity, in-ring versatility and fondness for garden tools have few peers in sports entertainment.

IF ONLY HE HAD AN APROPOS LYRIC REGARDING MISUNDERSTANDINGS OR MISTAKES, SO THAT I COULD HAVE A WITTY TITLE TO THIS POST: According to Phil Collins's U.K. rep, he's only taking a break from music and is not retiring.  But then he found out he was wrong when he thought he was right -- according to a statement by Collins on his own website, he is "calling it a day" but wants you to know he's conscious of the fact that in recent interviews he "ended up sounding like a tormented weirdo who thinks he was at the Alamo in another life, who feels very sorry for himself, and is retiring hurt because of the bad press over the years," none of which, he insists, is true. Need I say we care?

MORE LIKE DOUBLE POSITIVE: A little while ago someone -- perhaps Matt? or perhaps not -- mentioned that Sepinwall had identified "Donald Glover crying" as something that is never not funny. I think that Sepinwall also had long ago named "Donald Faison dancing" as something that is never not funny (though it may just have fallen into the slightly broader category of "never not enjoyable").

It got me thinking -- what else is never not funny? I'd say "Leslie Knope listing things" tops my list, though "Raylan Givens talks people out of gunplay" and "fake band names by anybody" are up there too.

I MARCHED THROUGH IT LIKE GENERAL SHERMAN, WITHOUT THE TORCHES: When I noted I’d be going to Atlanta for a long weekend, there was some interest in some bullets as to my culinary and cultural adventures in the Deep South’s biggest metro area (Atlanta itself is surprisingly small population-wise, but there are tons of “pocket cities” and suburbs). Since you asked, I deliver:

• The World of Coca-Cola—Neither as cheesy nor as fun as you might have hoped. Particularly disappointing is the “Coke In Pop Culture” gallery, which makes space for some Coke-driven Pop Art, the “Coke Couch” from Idol Season 5, and only a single small case on the New Coke debacle. The origins gallery and the tiny bottling plant were cool, as was the chance to sample not just international Coca-Cola products, but also the new “Freestyle” machine, which dispenses several new specialty products (Orange Coke? Raspberry Coke?). Touristy, but worthwhile, especially with kids, I’d expect.
• Georgia Aquarium—A very well done aquarium, notable for three things—its size, the size of several of the animals kept there (it’s one of the very few aquaria large enough to house whale sharks, which, amusingly, are neither whales nor sharks), and the large number of touch pools offered for kids. Pricey, but if you’re into marine life, worth it.
• The Varsity—An Atlanta institution, this “world’s biggest drive-in” isn’t worth it for the food (greasy burgers and chili dogs, mediocre fries, though a nice fried peach pie), but the atmosphere is interesting (someone made the mistake of ordering a Pepsi while I was there, and the cashiers have a prescripted, very loud, rant for that). Not haute cuisine, but you get why it’s an institution (being crazy cheap and located basically on the Georgia Tech campus also helps).
• Flip Burger—Commenter Amy joined me for lunch at Richard Blais’ burger joint. Unsurprisingly, few of the burgers are straight up. I was a bit underwhelmed with the burger—I opted for one that was a burger patty topped with chopped/shredded BBQ brisket and house BBQ sauce. The sauce was a bit thin and overly spicy, tasting more like a house spice sauce like Tabasco than a BBQ sauce, and the combination was too dense for its own good—a veritable meat tornado--some cheese to break it up would have been a good idea. The sides, on the other hand, shined—the fries and onion rings were solid, but most impressive was a roasted cauliflower, which was spiced to perfection and got eaten far more quickly than you might expect. Of course, this being a Blais joint, the large tub of liquid nitrogen in the back has to get used, and it’s used primarily for milkshakes—I opted for one based on Nutella with torched/toasted marshmallows on top, which was excellent. As one might expect with Blais, not every experiment works, but when they do, they really do.
• Center for Puppetry Arts—Amy and I then headed to this Atlanta institution—we passed on the puppet shows, but did the Jim Henson tour, which tours the collection of Henson puppets and related things donated to the museum, including original Kermit, Ernie, Big Bird, Rowlf, Dr Teeth, and Pigs in Space puppets, as well as a bunch of stuff from other Henson projects—Fraggle Rock, Labyrinth, the La Choy Dragon. Included in the tour is the “tunnel of arms” from Labyrinth, which was staffed not with puppeteers, but with extras. One would hope they are now very proud of having had the opportunity to grab the young Jennifer Connelly’s ass and get paid for it. The other part of the collection is less impressive, and the “random puppet heads” room is seriously creepy. The Henson stuff is very well done, and I hope they find the space to show more of it.
• Watershed—This restaurant (out in Decatur) is a well-regarded temple to traditional southern cooking co-owned by Emily Sailers. As you’d expect from a Sailers-owned restaurant, the vibe is light and airy, rather than a crowded mess.While they apparently brought in a new chef about a year and a half ago to replace the highly regarded former chef, who left to pursue other interests, the food was quite solid—a massive pork chop was thick, meaty, but still tender (though a touch salty, which is often unavoidable when working with pork), the mac and cheese excellent, the collard greens good (I am not a fan, but these were nicely buttery), and the Very Good Chocolate Cake lived up to its name.

Not all of the trip was high points (the nearly 9 hours from checkin at the Atlanta airport till return to my home due to a weather mess in NYC last night was less than fun, and it was chilly all weekend), but still, a worthwhile trip.

COME BACK, KIM DELANEY! Via the AV Club Philly, six films shot in Philadelphia but set elsewhere.  Left out: Jimmy Smits's Outlaw (a/k/a Sh*t My Ghost Lawyer Dad Says), where his "DC" apartment in the pilot is on the same block of Delancey Street as Winthorpe's home in Trading Places and the NPH The Best and the Brightest shoot highlighted in the link, and in which the Franklin Institute's front steps become a courthouse's.  Also, why does Philadelphia sub in for Cedar Rapids in Cedar Rapids?

A fuller list of Films Shot Here is here.

POSSIBLE WORLD EXCLUSIVE - MUST CREDIT ALOTT5MA:  At about fifty-six minutes into Eddie Murphy's Coming to America (1988), Prince Akeem of Zamunda is introduced to two American myths presented as fact -- a competitive St. John's basketball team and a gratuitous hand-job from his date for the game, Patrice McDowell, sister of his eventual bride Lisa (accompanied to the game by Darryl "Soul Glo" Jenks, played by ER's Eriq LaSalle). Inspired by recent research on Ferris Bueller's Day Off and The Town, I wanted to try to determine: what game was it?

As it turns out, this wasn't that hard to determine: the Redmen were facing the Marist Red Foxes at the Garden, something they did twice in the years preceding the filming. Indeed, Marist's Rik Smits (#45) is immediately recognizable during the sequence, with the Dunking Dutchman delivering the kind of powerful 7-foot-plus performance the silver screen would not see again until Shawn Bradley's work in Space Jam nearly a decade later.

And pretty clearly, it's the December 28, 1987 game, the first round of the 36th ECAC Holiday Festival Tournament. The players we see match up with the box score -- including Boo Harvey (#3), future NBAer Shelton Jones (#31), and future NBAer/defendant Jayson Williams (#11). Most tellingly there's a scoreboard ad for "Knicks vs. Phoenix, Tue. Jan. 5 - 7:30 P.M" -- a game the Knicks indeed played (and lost).

In conclusion, as Akeem said at the game: Yes! In the face!

NO MATTER HOW YOU SPELL IT, PAUL MCCARTNEY WON'T PLAY WITH THEM:  Slashfood and the United States Department of Agriculture explain why and under what circumstances a Nestlé-owned frozen pizza company (which is not delivery) can sell something called "wyngz" which contains no actual chicken wing meat.  Up next: spinach-free spynych?

LEONARD BERNSTEIN, LILLIAN HELLMAN, LENA HORNE, AND LES PAUL'S DEAD:  The Awl's J. Feindt ranks the 173 subjects of PBS's "American Masters" series in order of Americanness and mastery.

HELLO, I REALLY, REALLY MUST BE GOING NOW:  Citing a variety of health issues as well as his perception that listeners have grown sick of and "want to strangle" him, Phil Collins has announced his retirement from the music business. "It's hardly surprising that people grew to hate me. I'm sorry that it was all so successful. I honestly didn't mean it to happen like that," he says.

Out of respect, I will link to both his London and South Philadelphia performances of July 13, 1985, and link to, but not transcribe, the appropriate NSFW Patrick Bateman monologue.

DO YOU HAVE A SOUL? Very quickly, a remarkably accurate flowchart that helps you select the baseball team for which you should root.* (Link is currently broken; mirrored link here, thanks to Matt B.)

*Yeah, that's right, I said "for which." And I reworded the sentence so that I didn't have to wrestle with the question mark in the title. And for what it's worth, the main sentence of the post is a sentence fragment. Grammar in revolt! My grammar is revolting!

IN WHICH TOM COLICCHIO IS FORCED TO EMPLOY THE PURPLE ROCK OF DEATH: Without spoiling the conclusion of Wednesday's Top Chef All Stars, I can (I think) safely note that the elimination decision involved competitors at the tops of their culinary games, in which everyone acknowledged it was excruciating and unfair for anyone to have to lose. But competitions are competitions, and those who saw it understand what happened.

But I couldn't help but wonder: when has this happened before on other reality competitions, in which "we'd really hate to see someone go home" because it was so close and no one deserved to go home -- and then someone did.  First examples I can think of are Project Runway 1's final four (Jay-Kara Saun-Wendy-Austin, given that Wendy won the challenge), ANTM's final four in cycle two (Yoanna-Mercedes-Shandi-April), the Paschal-Neleh-Helen-Vecepia final four in Survivor 4, and the Jordin-Blake-Melinda final three on Idol 6.  And, of course, Tom and Ian on the buoys, which remains my favorite Survivor challenge of all precisely because both of them "deserved" to be in the final two, and neither of them was going to take the other into the final Tribal. Someone had to win, and someone had to lose.

(Which in turn reminds me why I love the Amazing Race so much - yes, they're all really good teams at the end. The finish mat is still the mat, and you really have to get there before the last team does.)

ALOTT5MA FRIDAY GRAMMAR RODEO SPECIAL BONUS DOUBLE FEATURE:  Because today is National Grammar Day, I would like to provide incentives for everyone to celebrate it by including a second post on the topic today in addition to Isaac's inquiry. Perhaps one way is to note that "to provide incentives" sure seems to take up an awful lot of words, and, gosh, wouldn't it be nice to reduce it to one word -- hey, how about incent or incentivize?

"KILL ME A SON!," GOD SAID TO ABRAHAM. "WHAT?," ASKED ABRAHAM, "YOU MUST BE PUTTIN' ME ON." "YOU DO WHAT YOU WANT TO, BUT NEXT TIME I SEE YOU, YOU BETTER RUN!," REPLIED GOD. "WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS KILLING DONE?," ASKED ABRAHAM. Saddle up, grammar cowboys, the Friday Grammar Rodeo is starting. Which of these passages is correct, and which are mispunctled?

1. "How much," she said. "For three hundred dollars I'll do it."
2. "Is something wrong?" she said. Of course there is. "You're still alive!" she said. Oh, do I deserve to be?
3. "There must be some kind of way out of here!," said the joker to the thief.

We know that punctuation belongs inside the quotation marks, unless you have the misfortune of being born in England. The dilemma is what to do with the punctuation if you are following the quotation with an attribution -- "he said"; "she asked"; "they shouted in unison." Ordinarily, it's not a problem -- we just drop the period and put a comma before the close-quote. But if we want to employ a question mark or an exclamation point (assume the propriety of the latter), then what? Omit, question mark/exclamation point only, or the weird double-punctuation thing with the mark/point followed by a comma?

The Orange Bible, perhaps surprisingly, thinks that #3 above is the way to go: "The sixteenth edition of CMOS recommends using a comma after a question mark if it would normally be required." This looks the most wrong to me, and consensus at ALOTT5MA HQ is that #2 is the best option. Are we wrong?

SHE IS TELLING THEM HER INTENTIONS AS TO WHETHER SHE WILL BE GOING:  Twenty-four entered the IdolDome tonight; only 13 now retain hopes of becoming Your Next American Idol.  Fienberg has the recap, and we hope to be adding some analysis from a welcome source.

HOW I MET THE CRITICS: I am shocked, shocked that a romcom written by, directed by and starring HIMYM's Josh Radnor could be described by critics as "insufferable," "looks and sounds like a flop pilot for a television," "nothing of substance," "implausible, cutesy-poo," "sentimental," "preposterous," "tepid," "relentlessly cheery," "reeks of desperation"  (NYT); "like a sitcom, but without the burning narrative urgency," "the epitome of 'indie,' and not in a good way," "gives new meaning to self-indulgence and self-infatuation," "audiences will be taking sides depending on what coast they don't live on," "the characters are uniformly annoying, their stories insubstantial and the tone one of smug contentment" (Variety); "twee," "problematic," "horribly disjointed," "the film's principal project is to trade in questionable racial characterization as a catalyst for its white protag's personal fulfillment" (Slant); and "treating their problems like they're the most important crises in the world is what people in their 20s do, but that doesn't mean we have to go along for the ride" (LA Times).

RASPBERRY VERSUS POP POP! Five uses of balloons in video game promotions that are better than THQ's stupid stunt yesterday:

1. Fill balloons with copies of Call of Juarez and pay people to swallow them and cross the border
2. Hire a spokesmodel to wear a suit of branded balloons and strip them off by popping them, combining the retro-seductive art of burlesque with America's second-most-popular PTSD trigger
3. Use them to make farting noises; these farting noises are brought to you by THQ
4. Hand two balloons to potential customer; when both of customer's hands are occupied, punch him in the face and shout "our prices will knock you out!"
5. Build a balloon raft and row it into the bay to retrieve balloons from last promotion

GLASSWORTS: There is an obvious question about last night's Top Chef All Stars, which for spoiler reasons I'll ask below the fold.

HE'S NOT A NUMBER: If there's an element of tonight's Survivor which wasn't wholly satisfying, I'm going to ignore it. It started with a Redemption Island challenge stolen from the Brady Bunch episode with Jim Backus in the ghost town on the way to the Grand Canyon, flowed through what happened with the HIIs and the immunity challenge, and ended with another graduate-level course in strategery at Tribal.  If you missed seeing purple rocks on the show or wondered whether Survivor could be improved by having a weasel-y Sarah Silverman lookalike as a Russell Hantz factotum, well, you even got that too.  This is a season worth your time.

I DON'T EVEN THINK HAVING BARRY SCHECK IS A GOOD ENOUGH DEFENSE HERE:  For the crime of attempting an ill-advised big band reinterpretation of a Fiona Apple tune, Rachel Zevita's one of many singers likely headed home tonight. Honestly, only Pia Toscano's powerful "I'll Stand By You" and Lauren Alaina's flirty "Turn on the Radio" impressed me tonight above the pageant-ready performances we generally saw (and over which the judges fawned excesively). I'm kinda intrigued by Lauren Turner, and I assume Thia Megia survives based on narratively-apt song selection, but that's about it.  Unlike the men, I have minimal confidence about how this is going to play out tomorrow.

THOUGHTS ON A PROMOTION: At 12:30 this afternoon, thousands of red balloons filled the sky above San Francisco.

Me: That looks kind of cool.
San Franciscans generally: I do not see what you are talking about because when I am outside I look only at my iPhone and whatever you're talking about has not yet hit my Twitter feed.
San Francisco: I do not recall issuing a permit for this.
Sanitation Worker: Fuck.
Bird: Choke.
Me: I wonder what this is a promotion for.
Marketer: Yes!
Balloon: Being unmarked, I will not tell you.
Marketer: Oops.
Me: Looked cooler two minutes ago when the balloons were in the sky, not on the ground and in the bay.
Fish: Choke.

REALISTICALLY SPEAKING, YOU DO NOT F*** WITH A SPECIES THAT CAN DO THAT: Given Das Boot, there is no movie directed by Wolfgang Petersen I won't pay full freight to see. Given 2005's science fiction masterwork Old Man's War, there is no John Scalzi novel I won't buy in hardcover. That Paramount bought OMW for Petersen to direct makes me a very very happy movie goer.

I JUST THINK IT NEEDED A LITTLE BIT MORE OF AN IMPROVISATIONAL, WE-JUST-DID-IT-THIS-WEEK KIND OF FEELING: New editor Hugo Lindgren talks up more of the changes starting in this week's NYT Magazine. Among those which will delight: instead of Cooking with Dexter (and others), three Mark Bittman columns a month (and one from Sam Sifton).  Also: Nate Silver sneaks in once a month, and, yes, Dr. Lisa Sanders's "Diagnosis" stays.  This may not suck.

added: Just unveiled -- The 6th Floor, the Magazine's new blog.

THEIR FIRST QUESTION IS NOT "WILL IT BE GOOD?" BUT "CAN IT BE SOLD?" Writing for GQ, Mark Harris laments Hollywood's cautious attitude in an essay titled "The Day The Movies Died." Two paragraphs to whet your interest:

TONIGHT, (DON'T) LET IT BE LOEWENSTERN:  What's noteworthy to me about tonight's Idol semifinals is what didn't change -- same lame backdrops and Muzak-leaning orchestrations, same Seacrest, same overall feeling that we're watching a variety show and not a legitimate search for the next contemporary pop superstar.  Same show, same type of songs and performances, only with different judges -- this was not the reinvention of Idol.

But what did change was mostly nice: fewer judges means more time for each to speak (Randy: critical! helpful!), and a 90 minute running time for twelve performers meant a briskly-paced, largely bullshit-free show.  Thanks, Nigel!  What I didn't like, though, was that immediately putting the performers on the big stage and not the comfier semifinals-in-the-round may have prevented some of them from finding their stagecraft sea legs, and some of them seemed a bit lost up there.  So, then, some initial tiers:

I CAN'T EVEN LOOK MRS. BUTTERWORTH IN THE EYE: In honor of National Pancake Day, Buzzfeed hooks you up with quality SFW pancake porn.

DERE CAN BE ONLY WAN: Hulu is running a March Madness-style bracket of the best shows on TV (guest critic: Alan Sepinwall), and the opening round has begun. I kind of hate the way that they've matched shows that are thematically or demographically similar, because it often forces me to vote against shows I like while voting for shows I don't watch, but I suppose that it makes for more interesting pairings. Some of the early returns are interesting, though early returns probably overcount depth of love relative to breadth.

Your homework, which appears to be the argument Hulu wants to provoke: make a cogent argument for why Glee is better than Friday Night Lights.

BETWEEN THIS AND JENNIFER LAWRENCE'S OSCAR DRESS, A COMEBACK IS CLEARLY COMING: As part of our continuing quest to note when the NYT makes strange cultural references, we note that today's edition features, in the lead of a 1A article, a reference to Baywatch Nights, the X-Files inspired spinoff of Baywatch.

IT STILL HAS ALMOST AS MUCH PLOT CONTINUITY AS A NORMAL EPISODE:In an effort to milk a few more bucks out of girls at slumber parties, the producers of Glee are releasing a Season 1 DVD that's nothing but two hours of the musical numbers from season one, without the annoying talking or plot. It's heavily focused on kid-driven numbers ("Alone," "Gold Digger," the "Don't Stand So Close To Me" mashup, and "Vogue" are the only adult-driven songs), and short on Matthew Morrison rapping, which is probably a good thing.

SOMEONE WHO KNOWS HOW TO USE HIS MOUTH: Thank goodness I was reminded, in the midst of watching pieces of Sheen flotsam and jetsam wash up on CNN's shore last night, that No Reservations was back on-air and, indeed, Bourdain in Haiti is well worth your time.

In order to remain one step ahead of the game, I should let you know that Sepinwall (and others) have raved about tonight's arc-closing Good Wife, and tonight on Idol the top 12 guys perform in the semifinals (ladies, tomorrow), with 24 becoming 13 on Thursday, so do enter our fantasy league now.  Song spoilers are available for both XY and XX night and, um, good luck with that one, Opera Girl. (Seriously, there has never been as pressure-filled a week as this on the show, with an almost 50% chance of elimination this early. Top five of each get voted ahead, plus three wild cards.)