LET THE SUN SHINE IN: In the spirit of WikiLeaks, it's about time this blog stepped-up and, you know, exposed some stuff.

Secret Stuff!

Like this super secret list of Secret Societies of the Morning F Train over at Heading East.

Shhhhh!

HEY, YOU! I KNOW YOU! I KNOW YOU!   The NYT reports on how Cirque du Soleil is putting a lot of former synchronized swimmers to work in Las Vegas.

WHY, I'D CUT OFF MY RIGHT ARM TO GET THAT GIG!  Next year's Academy Awards will be hosted by Anne Hathaway and James Franco.  If it's like recent years, you'll see a lot of them in the first half-hour and then they'll disappear because the show has fallen hopelessly behind schedule.   I'm sure they'll both be charming, but this doesn't much matter.

ALOTT5MA RECIPE DEPARTMENT: To make one Hallmark Hall of Fame film, mix the following:

• Adorably precocious child, ideally suffering from serious, yet vague, malady.
• Cantankerous older man played by beloved character actor who is taught that he can love again in part through the activities of adorably precocious child.
  
• Parent who wants to care for child in unorthodox way, played by recognizable, yet not particularly famous/costly, actor.
  
• Other parent, who at first disagrees with first patent's unorthodox plans, also played by recognizable, yet not particularly famous/costly, actor.
• (Optional) Add additional adorable/precocious children to taste.
  
• Framing device to reassure viewers all works out on the end.
• Self-evident Canadian filming locations.
  
• Cloying commercials about greeting cards.

IT'S NOT GOOD WHEN A SEVEN-YEAR-OLD KNOWS HOW THE EPISODE WILL END BEFORE IT STARTS:  But such is the way of the too-predictably-structured Amazing Race, which as soon as it determines its final four teams ... yeah.  Fienberg ably recaps it here, and I just want to note two things: (1) I do admire the ingenuity of combining Needle in a Haystack with Volume Eating as a challenge, and (2) if you didn't perform the Needle in a Haystack/Volume Eating challenge, you can't be a quitter on the teammate who did.  It's time to wrap up this season, and God willing we'll get to see good racing, and not random luck, decide things.

FWIW, we haven't yet discussed next season (have we?).  It will be an All-Star Season, which is filming now, and the eleven exceedingly amiable teams are listed here.

FOLLOW THESE INTREPID ANTIPODEAN EMU WATCHERS (or THE PLATONIC WORLD OF THE STATIC [BOOK] AND THE HEGELIAN WORLD OF PROCESS [INTERNET]--HOW GREAT THE CONTRAST!): Ed Park, of bookforum.com, muses on his transition from the 14th Edition (print) to the 16th Edition (on-line) of the Chicago Manual of Style.

I'm sure that, if I subscribe, the new edition will tell me how to make an en-dash in HTML.

Via C-Monster

SURELY YOU CAN'T BE SERIOUS:  But I am serious: comic actor Leslie Nielsen has died at the age of 84 of pneumonia-related complications.  Few performers made such brilliant use of oblivious deadpan as a comic tool.  Thank goodness the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team recognized it, so we could enjoy exchange after exchange like this one in The Naked Gun:

Frank: It's the same old story. Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, girls dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Jane: Goodyear?
Frank: No, the worst.

And one more: