9.0 IP 0 R 0 H 0 BB 11 K; 27 UP, 27 DOWN: Roy! Roy! The hardest working man in baseball did it all tonight. Wow.

(Was there some other sporting event going on?)

Below the fold, video of all twenty-seven outs.

FINALLY CLUBBER LANG WILL AVENGE HIS LOSS TO ROCKY BALBOA: Chicago Blackhawks v. Philadelphia Flyers, Game 1. If you never have given hockey a chance, you really should. Thank you for Ryne Sandberg and a nice dipped Italian Beef with sweet peppers beats a Philly Cheesesteak every time.

DON'T GET CAUGHT WATCHING THE PAINT DRY: Did anyone do crazy/intense on screen better than the late Dennis Hopper? Manohla Dargis penned a fine appreciation last month, and my words feel so inadequate to capture the brilliance of someone who delivered so many memorable performances -- Easy Rider, Blue Velvet, Apocalypse Now, Hoosiers, hell, Speed ... just mentioning each evoke so many strong memories for me of vividly real, hard-lived men functioning in a different reality from the rest of us. We're talking about an actor so compelling in his craziness that when he described Kevin Costner in Waterworld as being "like a turd that won't flush," you bought his anger even though he was evoking this metaphor in a world without running water and, hence, no flushing.

[Via the first link. Among his many marriages, Hopper was married to Michelle Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas for eight days. "Seven of those days were pretty good," Hopper said. "The eighth day was the bad one."]

Below the fold, the man at work with Christopher Walken in True Romance. Decidedly NFSW, but so worth it. RIP to a true American original, whom Roger Ebert and Matt Zoller Seitz places in proper context with text and video:

CONTINUING OUR ROUND THE CLOCK COVERAGE OF GARY COLEMAN'S DEATH: The Avenue Q creative team reacts to the Coleman's passing by wielding a scalpel and not a axe.

A FILM SO PLEASED WITH ITS VACUOUS, TRASHY, ART-FREE EXTRAVAGANCE THAT ITS POSTER SHOULD BE TAPED TO THE DINGY WALLS OF TERRORIST SLEEPER AGENTS WORLDWIDE: Our friend Matt Zoller Seitz did not care for Sex and the City 2.

ETA: He's hardly alone. Buzzfeed has a great roundup to the critical reaction to "Lawrence of My Labia."

CHOOSE CAREFULLY: A quick poll, because I want to take the nation's temperature on this. Matt Costa: endearingly understated indie folkster or insufferably saccharine cheeseball?

AS FAR AS YOU CAN TELL A HOUSE BECOMES HOTEL WHEN YOU MAKE IT WHAT YOU WANT TO: Since we're already degenerating into Lost-level minutiae about Diff'rent Strokes, here's something I was thinking about this afternoon.

I believe, but could be convinced otherwise, that Diff'rent Strokes was the first show to assemble the complete version of the paradigmatic family sit-com main set. Slightly raised main entrance at house right, door to the rest of the house at house left, stairway upstage (running from house right at the bottom to house left at the top), couch downstage. Off the top of my head, after Diff'rent Strokes this was the layout for Cosby, Charles in Charge, Married With Children, and Modern Family (I have a vague recollection that it was the setup for Eight Is Enough as well). I'm into deep memory here, but I think that this set design builds on the All in the Family prototype, which is the same except that the couch is a pair of recliners/chairs sharing a table.

Am I wrong?