KEEPING THE WIG UP ON THE SHELF:  Adam Lambert was approached about doing Hedwig on Broadway, but declined, because he didn't "want to get in drag for eight shows a week."  (Taye Diggs takes the wig off the shelf in July to take over the role from Darren Criss.)

THE LAST DAY OF SUMMER:  Worst day in the history of the entire tri-state area. Thank you, Agent P (as well as the show's creators) for all the joy and wit you delivered.

THE AMERICAN DREAM:  I recognize that today's news of the passing of wrestling superstar Dusty Rhodes won't matter to everyone here, but Ian Williams offers as good an explanation as you'll find:

Dusty wasn’t what all us Southern working class kids and adults wanted to be. He was what we already were. Dusty was fat and slovenly, his dress alternating between work clothes and garish, sloppy attempts at what you might think a rich man dressed like had you never actually seen one. His forehead bore the marks of his career, a mass of deeply grooved scar tissue after years of chair shots and blading. He wasn’t great in the ring, but was a master of psychology and storytelling. The stories he told were working class stories. He took his lisping Texas drawl and married it to an African–American preacher’s cadence. Not for nothing was one of his earliest nicknames the White Soul King. Rather than outright co–option, it seemed to be a sincere effort on Rhodes’ part to speak to a pan–racial working class, setting him up as a hero for blacks, whites, and Latinos to cheer on against whatever villainous rich guy he was put up against.

NOT PENNY'S BOAT:  "Through the Looking Glass," recapped, as ballsy and jaw-dropping and perfect as season-ending, game-changing cliffhangers have been in the new golden age of tv, the one that proved that Lindelof/Cuse knew where they were going with this story.  So much I can remember without even looking -- "That's for taking the kid off the raft," the return of the VW bus, Good Vibrations, Sayid kicking ass, Charlie's heroism. (Our original thread had 150+ comments on it; they're all lost, now.)

"THE PASSION FOR HIM WAS TO CREATE BEAUTIFUL LETTERS":  Hermann Zapf, who designed the Palatino, Optima, and Zapf Dingbats fonts (among many others), has died at the age of 96:

“Last Thursday, all the rest of us moved up one,” said Matthew Carter, whose designs for web fonts, including Verdana and Georgia, earned a MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called genius award, in 2010. “That’s my way of saying Hermann was on top.” 

Mr. Kelly said: “What Michelangelo was to sculpture and Beethoven was to music, that’s what Hermann Zapf is to type design and calligraphy. We’re all followers of his now.”

WAY HARSH, TAI:  Apparently, we could have had a version of Clueless starring Reese Witherspoon (as Cher), Ben Affleck (as Josh), and either Terrence Howard or Dave Chappelle (as Murray).

GAVIN BELSON WOULD NOT TOLERATE THIS NONSENSE: We frequently bash shows for their lack of legal realism around here, so I want to give immense credit to a show you might not expect for getting it right--HBO's Silicon Valley.  A major plot thread this year has been an IP theft case between plucky (yet only semi-competent) startup PiedPiper and behemoth Google Hooli.  Impressively, we haven't had any "dramatic" courtroom showdowns, but much more of the drudgery that litigation often involves (including stressing over fees and fee management, massive document dumps, and the like).  Yes, there is still some dramatic license (there is a "smoking gun" e-mail) and the idea that a case could go to "binding arbitration" as quickly as depicted by agreement of the parties is unrealistic, but you have to respect a show that doesn't show a case being resolved overnight.