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?