AND WHEN IN DOUBT, JUST GO WITH THE [X] FAMILY:  How to pluralize your family's last name for holiday cards.

FORMER DIME-STORE MIMBO MAKES GOOD:  A Fallon/Krasinski/Merchant-produced Lip Sync Battle: The Series will hit Spike TV this spring.  [It is v. difficult to pick between Merchant, JGL, Paul Rudd, and Emma Stone as the best competitor to date.]

WE'RE TALKING ABOUT PIZZA, MAN:  How bad are the Philadelphia 76ers?  So bad that Papa John's Pizza has had to change its "Sixers Win, You Win" promo, where Philly area orders got a 50% discount the day after a Sixers win, to "Sixers Score More Than 90 Points, You Win."

ALOTT5MA FOREIGN CAR DESK: So I am about halfway through Season 2 of the sublime The Americans when I noticed something.  With the exception of a single Citroen driven by some Russians and the Mercedes driven by a Congressional aide, I do not believe I have seen a single imported car driven by anyone within the narrative.  And it's all big body sedans, too.  Impalas and Crown Victorias and such.

Now, it's a lot of government cars, of course, but it is also possible I haven't seen a single vintage import on the street.  No Porsche 914s, no Honda Civic CVCCs, no Suburu Brats. The director's eye for the 1980s is simply too good for this to be an oversight.  And I think it's a great choice.

[N.B.: A spoiler-free thread, please, but any comments on the raw 80s-ness (and, indeed, early 80s-ness) of the show are welcomed.  Est? Intellivision? The same donut phone my sister had?]

LIVE FROM NEW YORK It's the remainder of the 2014 schedule:

11/22: Cameron Diaz (4th time)/Bruno Mars and Mark Ronson
12/6: James Franco (3x)/Nicki Minaj
12/13: Martin Freeman (rookie)/Charli 10-110 XCX
12/20: Amy Adams (2x)/One Direction

Other Martins who have hosted the show: Steve, Sheen, Strother, Pamela Sue, Billy, Short, Lawrence. Also, if you haven't seen it yet, last week's Match'd is one of the best basic-premise-executed-perfectly skits they've done in awhile.

THE PITCH IS BACK:  Pitch Perfect 2, first trailer. More of the same, plus unfortunate pratfall.

MIKE NICHOLS (1931-2014): How can you capture Mike Nichols' legacy easily? It's a series of dayenus: If he had only been half of Nichols and May, which helped redefine what sketch comedy would do, it would have been enough for us; if he had only directed The Graduate and not any of the other 20+ films he directed for screen and tv, my goodness, what a generation-defining, innovative, great film.

And yet there was also Carnal Knowledge. And Primary Colors. And Working Girl, a modern feminist fairy tale done right. And everything he did for the stage, including seven Tony Awards for Best Directing across a 41-year-span as well as introducing Whoopi Goldberg to the world through her amazing one-woman show.

This anecdote from Mark Harris' recounting of the making of The Graduate remains my favorite Nichols story:

When he had decided to make The Graduate three and a half years earlier, Nichols thought he knew exactly what his satirical targets were. ''I said some fairly pretentious things about capitalism and material objects, about the boy drowning in material things and saving himself in the only possible way, which was through madness,'' he recalls. But the deeper he got into the shoot and the more intensely he pushed Hoffman past what the actor thought he could withstand, the more Nichols realized that something painful and personal was at stake, and always had been, in his attraction to the story.