SPANNING THE GLOBE TO BRING YOU THE CONSTANT VARIETY OF SPORTS: Legendary sportscaster Jim McKay died today at the age of 86. He hosted Wide World of Sports for 40 years and covered 12 Olympic Games, traveling an estimated 4 1/2 million miles to cover 100 different sports in 40 different nations.

McKay was the opposite of the SportsCenter/Screamin' A. era, a soft-spoken gentleman averse to hype and drawn to storytelling, who always knew it was the athletes, not he, who was the star. And he was the right man for that awful time in Munich, 1972, when his "They're all gone" was all he could say, and all anyone could say. ESPN is describing him tonight as "the Walter Cronkite of sports," and that sounds right to me.

I COUGHED YOUR NAME/I SMOKED ALL DAY: There is a minor fire going on two doors down from my office right now -- some white smoke (but no dark smoke), one ladder car two ladder cars, a few firemen on the roof and many more just standing around. But man, do people love a fire. It looks like a rock concert out on the street -- people keep coming over from the touristy stuff nearby to gawk. If it really started burning you could probably sell tickets.

Ask The A.V. Club - June 6, 2008 | The A.V. Club

DO YOU HANKER FOR A HUNK OF CHEESE? The AV Club makes Time for Timer (3d item). Look, a wagon wheel! Now go eat your breakfast.

NOTHING MAKES YOU WANT TO VOTE IN 2008 LIKE MUSIC FROM 1993: A long, long time ago, this blog received its first name and web address from a Superchunk song, and though the Chapel Hill power pop quartet has largely remained dormant in recent years, I was delighted to learn that prior to the North Carolina primary they played a pair of free concerts with The Arcade Fire to encourage early voting on behalf of a candidate our no-politics rule suggests I dare not name. The two setlists, both heavy with On the Mouth and earlier works, are here, and I can point you to a wealth of YouTubage from the shows available including "Detroit Has A Skyline", "Driveway to Driveway", "Untied", and, yes, "Throwing Things".

Pitchfork reports, however: "The audience was respectfully enthusiastic, but when Superchunk broke out 'Precision Auto' and nobody went especially apeshit, I wondered if most of them were too young to care much about Superchunk." It is very much a song worthy of that reaction. Kids these days ...

BIG DAMN PAPERS: In case you think we're a little obssessive about pop culture and academia around here, it could always get moreso--I give you the program to this weekend's third annual "Slayage Conference on the Whedonverses." Program topics include:

• "An impossible birth to make one possible:" Contrasting Pregnancies on Angel
• From Academic to Addict: The Supernatural Substance Abuse of Willow Rosenberg
• "We play parts:" Saffron, Gender Stereotypes, and the Image of Domesticity in Firefly
• Gazing at Male Vampires: Angel's and Spike's Bodies as Spectacle

HARD TO BELIEVE DOOGAL DIDN'T MAKE THE LIST: If you are one of those self-congratulatory parents who boasts about how they never have let little Timmy sit in front of the TV for six straight Spongebob episodes, please skip this post, but if you are one the great unwashed masses who says TV raised me and I turned out sort of OK, you know that one of the great joys of parenthood is the release of a great kids movie that will stand up to repeated viewings in the multiplex, on DVD, and then on cable.

That's a long way of introducing this list of The 25 Best Animated Movies (it's click-through, but not as annoying as the Entertainment Weekly lists), which does a pretty good job of hitting the genres high notes. Still the list criminally underrates Toy Story 2, which is the animated version of Godfather 2. Also, I know its heresy, but I find Snow White somewhat unwatchable. And though Pixar is well-represented with Toy Story and Toy Story 2, plus Incredibles, Nemo, and Ratatouille, but I'd find a place for Monsters Inc. on the list, too. I'm glad Hayao Miyazaki gets his props, but My Neighbor Totoro needs to make the cut, too.

Any other favorites miss the cut?

THE TURK AT PLANET HOLLYWOOD: There are like 12,000 dancers in Las Vegas, and the judges are cutting about six dancers per round. That means that there are three usual staples of this show of which we'll see very little: soft-focus stories; Cat Deeley, and dancing. Instead, it's like a two-hour-solid block of judging, kind of like dinner with my grandma in the 1980s.

Spoiler alert: I'm telling you who's not making it through this round of SYTYCD:

• Quitters
• Moms
• That pageant girl who thinks she's all that
• The 45-year-old clinically-depressed '90s hip-hopper
• The girl who just fired her agency, and also some of the other professionals
• Everyone who was told "you were my favorite ... of the ..." in the audition rounds
• One or more members of every pair that depends upon each other for daily moral support
• The debilitatingly-injured (except Nigel) or possibly social-diseased
• Lippy tappers
• Selfish tappers
• Soccer balls

So what we're left with: salt-and-pepper poppers with personality, a likeable female hip-hopper, a tank-like male hip-hopper hiding a shady past of formal training, a slew of mature male contemporary dancers with occasionally bewildering haircuts, an "edgy" (in the same way that Idol uses the term, not the way it's used in the actual world) female contemporary dancer, an alleged ballerina, several high school or college student female dancers that are so implausibly cute that they may actually be animated fabric-softener mascots, and a creepy overtanned high school teacher whose entire wardrobe consists of denim miniskirts and neon swimwear.