RETURN OF THE BOSTON STRANGLER:  A history of 76ers-Celtics Game 7s.  Can't believe the Beat LA game is thirty years ago ... as for tonight, why not? Why the hell not?

SOMETHING STUPID:  Maureen Ryan did not care for this weekend's HBO biopic Hemingway and Gellhorn, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman:

Now that the first season of "Smash" has ended, this is the best hate-watching fodder we'll probably have for many months. 

Why is hate-watching the only realistic option? Because loving or even liking this expensive misfire is simply not possible. Even more than last year's turgid "Mildred Pierce," "Hemingway and Gellhorn" is a gigantic missed opportunity, a jaw-droppingly trying waste of time. Don't let the fancy names in the cast fool you: This is a stupid, stupid movie. 

We don't hate-watch Syfy's Saturday movie offerings -- "Sharktopus," "Mansquito" and the like -- because they know they're trash and they good-naturedly embrace their energetic lack of quality. Not only is "Hemingway and Gellhorn" wretched, it is bathed in pretentiousness and pseudo-intellectual delusions of grandeur. It's not just crap, it's expensive, painfully "artistic" crap starring a lot of actors who should have known better once they took a look at the script, which is hilariously awful.

Yes, but does it feature a scene in which Ms. Kidman urinates on one of the stars of High School Musical?

CUE RANDY SAVAGE'S MUSIC:  I met up last night with an old friend -- and do see Valerie's movie, Losing Control, when you have a chance -- and we got onto the subject how miserable the whole high school/class rank chase made both of us back in the day, a decimal-point driven battle (did you get a 99 or a 98 for the class? was the multiplier 1.15 or 1.2?) that occasioned four years of unnecessary tsuris and helicopter parenting.

I was going to do a rant about this here, but turns out I already did so nine years ago with regards to a controversy I've mostly forgotten, and since almost none of y'all were reading this site back then I'll just reproduce the key grafs:

[W]hy have one valedictorian in the first place? When I was in high school, we had one valedictorian from a class of 600, and it was nuts. Lots of us tried every angle we could to raise our averages -- some had their Science Fair work counted as an independent study, AP-level class; I had my co-teaching of a 10th grade Telecommunications class so credited, etc. 

We all ended up within decimal points of each other. We all ended up at good schools -- our year, it was MIT, Brown, Amherst, Wash U and Penn for the top kids. And none of it was worth the resentment, bitterness or competition. ... 

Just take the top 10-20 students, honor them all, and select the best speaker from among them for graduation. Life's too short for this bullshit.

ALOTT5MA FRIDAY GRAMMAR RODEO:  Ben Yagoda, no stranger to these parts, has been writing a great deal about commas online for the NYT of late. He notes, regarding The New Yorker's "scrupulous, bordering on fetishistic" rules regarding commas, the following example from a Jane Mayer article:

Before [Lee] Atwater died, of brain cancer, in 1991, he expressed regret over the “naked cruelty” he had shown to [Michael] Dukakis in making “Willie Horton his running mate.”

"No other publication would put a comma after 'died' or 'cancer,'" he explains. "The New Yorker does so because otherwise (or so the thinking goes), the sentence would suggest that Atwater died multiple times and of multiple causes."

AND HE'S ABANDONED BIG WILLIE WEEKEND:  Grierson & Leitch lament:

Seven Pounds was the last movie [Will] Smith appeared in, and it's difficult to blame him; I'd hide too.... So I looked forward to his return. Perhaps the time off would have left him energized, and ready for the next act of his career, in which he would retake the mantle as the most interesting global movie icon of our time. That has not happened. Instead, next Friday, Smith reappears on movie screens with a Men In Black sequel absolutely no one was asking for.... But it's not just that. Take a look at Smith's next five projects:

Men In Black 3
After Earth, a sci-fi drama about a father and son (Smiths Will and Jaden) investigating an alien planet, directed by M. Night Shyamalan
Hancock 2
Bad Boys 3
I, Robot 2

Seriously? This is what Will Smith has decided to do with his career? That is some real Nicolas Cage-esque laziness right there.... Smith's movie stardom is now a matter of maintaining the brand, which is always when the brand begins to fade.

So, um, you going this weekend?

WHEN IS THE LAST TIME YOU STARED AT AN HOURGLASS WHILE WAITING FOR SOMETHING?  Computer icons based on dated technologies.

THEN, TRAGICALLY, YOU WILL HAVE WASTED YET ANOTHER DAY IN THE LIFE YOU'VE ALREADY MISSPENT IN THE SERVICE OF THE CITY OF BALTIMORE:  Unfortunately, I missed Wire Wednesday yesterday (and still haven't seen "Duck and Cover"), and next week is day two of the spelling bee -- and we don't want to cross those streams, I would think -- so let's do this: in two weeks, on Wednesday, June 6 (Wire Wednesday D-Day), we'll cover three episodes at once. Be prepared to discuss "Duck and Cover," "Stray Rounds," and "Storm Warning," and we'll be caught up, and obviously by that point crime and corruption will be gone from Charm City, and all the working class of all races will have good, stable jobs with bright futures.  Except for Ziggy.