AND WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR, STILL ISN'T FOUND: It's pointless for me to review the Broadway production of Hairspray reuniting original cast members Marisa Jaret Winokur and Harvey Fierstein, which we took Lucy to see today, since it's closing tomorrow. I'll just say that it's good to see Tevin Campbell still getting work (2+ years as Seaweed) seventeen years after Graffiti Bridge, and that his career has recovered since, um, yeah.

[Also for your oh-that's-where-he-is-now? 1980s standup comic Kevin Meaney, covering the roles of Principal, UltraClutch Owner and Mr. Pinky.]

e.t.a. Charles Isherwood on all the shows closing in the next two weeks.

I'M WAITING FOR HIS SHOWDOWN WITH DEXTER MORGAN: For those suffering from Bartowski Withdrawal Syndrome (no episodes for a full month, until a 3-D-a-palooza the day after the Big Game Trademarked By The National Football League), I join Alan in heartily recommending Burn Notice as a substitute, having devoured basically the entire first season in a matter of days. The tale of spy Michael Westen, who's sort of a much more violence-willing MacGyver, who gets inexplicably blacklisted by his employer and left to fend for himself in Miami with the help of his ex-girlfriend, a former IRA operative whose motto is "shoot first, and ask questions about our relationship during or immediately after" and his old spying buddy, played by Bruce Campbell in full Bruce Campbell mode (also, discuss--is Nathan Fillion the new Bruce Campbell?), is seriously solid stuff--funny, smart, suspenseful. Verdict's out on whether all the rules of spying in Southern California also apply to Miami spying, though at least some seem to.

Season 1 is available and reasonably priced on DVD, and the final few episodes of Season 2 begin airing in a few weeks on USA, which I'm sure will constantly rerun them.

HOT HITS: Having recently listened to WXPN count down its Top 100 songs of 2008, I gave some thought to my favorite songs of the past year. I checked the Billboard charts, a helpful group of lists on amazon.com, and a good list compiled by Ed Masley of The Arizona Republic.

In the end, I had some trouble coming up with ten songs that I really loved. In any event, here they are in alphabetical order by title:

You Want the Candy by the Raveonettes (the wall of sound from the great girl groups of the 1960's as if performed by The Velvet Underground with some salacious wordplay)

That's Not My Name by the The Ting Tings (The Tings Tings had many good songs this year)

Sequestered in Memphis by The Hold Steady (The Hold Steady should be paying royalties to Mott the Hoople. I love the chorus: "In bar light, she looked all right/ In daylight, she looked desperate/ That's all right, I was desperate too")

Real Love by Lucinda Williams

No One by Alica Keys (I think of this as a 2007 song, but Billboard considers it a 2008 release)

Mercy by Duffy (this would have not sounded out of place on a soul oriented radio station in 1968)

Chasing Pavements by Adele (ditto)

Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa by Vampire Weekend (this is probably not my favorite song of the past year, but it is the song that will most clearly call to mind 2008 for me in the future)

American Boy by Estelle (feat. Kanye West) (pure pop for now people!)

Always a Friend by Alejandro Escovedo and Bruce Springsteen (the song of the summer!)

Feel free to list your favorites in the comments.

JUST THE DOCTOR, THAT'S ALL: Tomorrow, we will know who will follow in the footsteps of Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston, and David Tennant as the Eleventh Doctor. British bookmakers are offering odds on everyone from the nonsensical (Jason Statham, Jim Broadbent, Daniel Radcliffe) to the intriguing (Chiwetel Ejofor, Richard Coyle) to the obscure (Matt Smith and Patterson Joseph--current frontrunners). I have high hopes for the show under Coupling maestro Steven Moffat's direction (especially given his jaw-droppingly brilliant "Blink"), and his choice of Doctor may give us some idea of where he wants to take the show.

NATE SILVER, YOU'RE ON NOTICE: We get emails:

Did you guys see this story? The 10th graders in the Communications Arts Program at Blair won the WaPo crystal ball competition. They beat a ton of political experts and their predictions were crazy close to the actual outcome. I was in CAP 10 last year, so I didn't do crystal ball because it wasn't an election year, but it was a really great class (Mr. Freeman is fantastic) and I'm not surprised they did so well (CAP has actually won before, but not for a while). I've never emailed ALOTT5MA before, but I thought this was pretty cool.

Two things about this email intrigued me -- first of all, that these tenth graders outwitted the professional pundits (and semipros like Silver and Kos), and secondly, that we have a reader who's in the eleventh grade. For real, I figure the median mode reader of this site is a mid-thirties white urban lawyer, so of course I wanted to figure out what the heck she was doing here. Her name is Maddy, and she reports:

The school is Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD. It's a public school, but it has two magnet programs-- the Communications Arts Program (CAP) and the Math-Science-Computer Science Magnet. The kids who won crystal ball were in 10th grade CAP-- they did the project in NSL (National, State, and Local Government-- our county's way of saying American Gov.) Crystal Ball asks political experts (and a couple of high schools) to predict the general election as well as key senate races.

And the the story of why a random high school student is reading your blog is a bit long but here goes: A little more than a year ago I got pretty sick. I went from playing sports and barely watching any TV/generally being out of the pop culture loop to watching hours upon hours of TV a day. I've since gone back to school part time, but I'm still at home, tired and bored, much of the time, so I continue to watch a lot of TV, obsess over pop culture, and spend way too much time online (I even started my own TV blog because I needed something fun to do). During my extensive online travels I came across Alan Sepinwall's blog, which led me to ALOTT5MA.

Sorry, that's probably way more than you wanted to know. I actually have a question for you, if that's ok. How do you find all of the crazy and random stories you link to in the blog?

I'm happy to answer that one, and I invite my colleagues to jump in -- basically, I just know who the best editors are out there -- which sites are most likely to have found the content I'll find interesting -- traditional media like the NYT/WaPo arts sections, the essential TV Tattle, PopWatch, really, everyone along the right side of the page here. Plus I newsgoogle And then collectively, God willing, we serve ourselves as useful secondary aggregators (and analysts) of what we find. And if teenagers find it interesting, well, um, okay!

e.t.a. Our under-25 and 50+ population is making itself known in the comments. If you're among them, do let us know.

TURTLES, ALL THE WAY DOWN: That's Sir Terry Pratchett to you, pal.

Also, Robert Plant was named Commander of the British Empire - one slot short of a knighthood.

NB: I see that a number of CBEs sport the honorific "Sir," so maybe I've got this mixed up.

I AM SHIVA THE DESTROYER, YOUR HARBINGER OF DOOM THIS EVENING: Rachel Getting Married combines so many of this blog's interests -- Tamyra Gray, proper dishwasher loading techniques, Elvis Stojko, people who should see In Her Shoes and, of course, Anne Hathaway -- that I'm surprised it took me until today to see it.

To merely call it "well-written" undersells just how perfectly and subtly Jenny Lumet's screenplay reveals this damaged family in all its pain and joy, and I cannot say enough about Hathaway's brittle, bitter, true performance. There's a shot -- when they're cutting the cake -- that just floored me, and this film is just full of magical little touches, unforced moments of recognition, of brilliance, pain and occasional beauty.

[Go back to our August 2004 initial discussion of Hathaway, when the question was whether she, Julia Stiles, Kirsten Dunst, Hillary Duff, Keira Knightley or someone else was most likely to be the next Julia Roberts-level star. Right now, she's winning.]

There are filmmakers who focus on dysfunction -- I'm thinking of Todd Solondz and Noah Baumbach -- whose goal is to make the viewer uncomfortable, to squirm in the face of all that awfulness. Jonathan Demme's goals are different, his heart is larger and this film is so much more rewarding as a result. Highly recommended.