DOES THE LADY CHABLIS APPROVE?  The Girl Scouts will be adding Savannah Smiles cookies to the mix this year, "a lemon-wedge shortbread cookie dusted with powdered sugar ... cool and crisp, with just the right number of lemon chips to deliver tiny bursts of flavor." CSM notes:

Not all cookie varieties are quite so successful. The Girl Scouts have discontinued scores of cookie varieties during the program’s run, including Aloha Chips (with macadamia nuts and white chocolate chips), Apple Cinnamons, Double Dutch (chocolate cookies with chocolate chips), and the raspberry jam-filled Ice Berry Piñatas.

Despite Girl Scouts' efforts to make their cookies healthier (in 2007, several recipes were reworked so that they had zero trans-fat), the health-minded cookie offerings sell terribly. Many sugar-free and 100-calorie cookies have been briefly available, all disappearing quickly. Daisy Go Rounds, a 100-calorie replacement of the retired Cinna-Spins, only lasted two years (2009-2011).

Here's our previous discussion of the Core Six cookies.

IT HADN'T BEEN YOU:  Linda Holmes would like a disclaimer system in place to let us know when music has been replaced in streaming and dvd releases of tv shows and films because of rights restrictions. While watching When Harry Met Sally via Amazon digital download, she notes with regret how the ending is butchered:

We briefly reunite with the original soundtrack for Connick's plinking piano on "But Not For Me" and a quiet "Isn't It Romantic?" And then back to "But Not For Me," and then ... and then in the movie, there is a climactic moment when Frank Sinatra kicks in: "It had to be you." This is the moment that drives the entire concluding sequence of the film. Frank Sinatra is it. The alpha and the omega of love in New York on New Year's Eve, and instead of freaking Frank Sinatra singing a standard, the digital download gives you ... generic saxophone noodling.

It's pretty much an entirely different sequence, without any of the sense of inevitability and destiny — not to mention, you know, romance — that you get from Frank Sinatra kicking in.

WHO IS KAREEM ABDUL-JABAAR?  We've discussed a few of these before, but Mental Floss's 10 Classic Moments on Jeopardy! compilation nicely includes them all in one place.

PAGING GUS AND HERA FROM THE AMAZING RACE: Via sconstant, Ikea instructions for the Hadron Collider.

THE THING WITH THE ESCAPE FROM THE PLACE THAT TIME: The long-gestating Broadway musical Houdini (which has been through several book writers, including Kurt Andersen, and several score writers, including Danny Elfman) allegedly is finally moving forward with Hugh Jackman (who's been attached for quite some time) as Houdini, a new score from Stephen Schwartz (his first since Wicked, and somewhat surprisingly, he doesn't have a Tony--Wicked lost to Avenue Q, Pippin lost to A Little Night Music, and Godspell lost to Annie), and a book from Aaron Sorkin (looking to leave himself with only a Grammy to go EGOT).

ON WATCHING AND REWATCHING THE WIRE: Just a few procedural comments for people approaching the series with some trepidation (which surely you are, since something had to keep you from the #1 prescribed television show of the last decade):

GOT TO. THIS IS AMERICA, MAN:  Even if I had never read a word about The Wire before watching its pilot episode, "The Target," I'd probably recognize (I hope) that this is not a world in which it's likely that McNulty is going to decimate the Avon Barksdale drug ring, become a hero, and live happily ever after. (Maybe I'm wrong: don't spoil!)

Compared to Homicide: Life on the Street, with much of the same crew in front of and behind the camera, everything and everyone feels more worn down, stuck. No showy camera moves (save the flashback) no chase scenes and dramatic interrogations in The Box; what we see in "The Target" instead is a lot of meetings and hierarchies of power. On Homicide, Giardello was clearly in charge and powerful from day one; I don't see anyone that commanding on the police side in this Baltimore, thus far.

This is a Baltimore in which no one's bothering to look at the strippers anymore; life just keeps going on, with little incentive to get too excited. The guy who steals money from the craps game every week keeps playing, because petty theft is tolerated as long as there's a decent ass-whuppin' to be had, just like not-cleared murders aren't something to raise a fuss about even when a Judge asks you about them, just like it's okay to shoot a mouse when you have to get rid of a mouse, just like how the police still don't have computers instead of typewriters.  And if someone thinks Alexander Hamilton was a President, it's not worth fighting him too hard on it. Givin' a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck is not tolerated in Baltimore.

A pointer from Alan Sepinwall, from his essential "Wire for newbies" recap:

[F]or the most part, "The Wire" took a very different approach to narrative from any series in American history, so much so that it essentially had to teach you how to watch it. The cast is huge -- and the season one cast is tiny in comparison to later seasons, which would bring in new characters from the Baltimore docks, City Hall, schools, newspapers, homeless community, etc. -- and almost everyone you meet will play a key role in the unfolding storylines.