Blame Jar Jar Binks.

If George Lucas had never created that annoying, slapstick-prone CGI character in The Phantom Menace, history would be different. No amount of "meesa so sorry" can make up for this abomination. And to add insult to injury, Lucas is sending a 3D Jar Jar Binks into theaters on February 10th.

When The Phantom Menace first came out in 1999, Jar Jar became the focus of fan hatred and ridicule. Jar Jar was meant to be comic relief for the kiddies, but he came to symbolize what fans saw as Lucas' flawed creative judgment. One fan was so incensed he re-cut the movie to minimize Jar Jar's presence. He then distributed VHS and DVD copies this "improved" version for free to other fans. It came to be known as "The Phantom Edit," and it gave Star Wars geek Jamie Benning his first taste of fan filmmaking.

"I think when 'The Phantom Edit' first came out of The Phantom Menace,' I think a lot of people realized that the ability for people to do this kind of thing had arrived," says Benning.

In 2006, Benning joined an online group petitioning Lucas to release the Star Wars trilogy in its original form. You know, the one where Han Solo — not bounty hunter Greedo — shot first. Lucas ignored their pleas.

So Benning, a professional editor in sports television and full-time Star Wars nerd, took matters into his own hands and created a fan film.

Benning's films are unofficial documentaries. He uses footage from the original movies without permission from Lucas. Benning follows the flow of the original films but expands them with things like alternate takes and interviews from commentary tracks. For example, Benning edits audio from a Star Wars radio drama over footage of deleted scenes while on-screen text explains that the grainy black and white images come from what's known as the "Lost Cut."

"When I made Star Wars Begins," Benning recalls, "and put that on YouTube, that seemed to touch a chord with people. I think people had become disillusioned with the Star Wars franchise as being spread too thin."

Benning's self-described "filmumentaries" are addictive. Once you start watching you can't turn them off — they overload your senses with trivia and behind the scenes information.

"Jamie Benning's 'Star Wars' documentaries are like DVD extras squared or even cubed," says Francine Stock, presenter of BBC 4's The Film Programme, and author of the book In Glorious Technicolor. "They're amateur in the true sense of being made by someone who really loves his subject."

But Benning's films are professional in terms of the craft. Images may be grainy, but the editing reveals meticulous skill and a geek's dedication to assembling every bit of information in the most enlightening way. Scott Weinberg, film critic for Fearnet, Twitch, and Movies.com, says the fan docs remind people why they fell in love with Lucas' films in the first place and provide a total geek fix. "Oh heck yeah. It's impressive," Weinberg exudes, "and it's just a testament to fandom, to 'this is the way we would like our supplement material.' I think it speaks to a lack of satisfaction with the DVD industry."

Benning repurposes copyrighted material, but Weinberg doesn't see a problem with that. It's no different than someone making a mix tape and sharing it with friends. "This is a love letter," he insists, "It's not someone repurposing a film to make a quick dollar. That's not what it's about. I think it speaks to a passion and a skill that he's willing to do it for the love of it. You could call it a movie fan remix. A commentary remix — video, audio, textual commentary."

Benning spends close to a year on each documentary. He makes no money on any of the films, because copyright issues prevent him from distributing the films theatrically or on DVD. But Francine Stock says making these films isn't a hobby for Benning, it's a calling. "They are more of a compulsion," she says. "And they stand or fall on their energy and style."

Weinberg thinks the DVD industry should be hiring Benning to create bonus features that fans would genuinely embrace. Fans have already shown their love for Benning's films by sending the filmmaker more than 10,000 appreciative e-mails. In addition, his trilogy got more than 3 million views on YouTube. But just recently, the site requested he remove the films. Benning has now uploaded them to Vimeo. The new site reports that Star Wars Begins has already received hits from such diverse locations as occupied Palestine and Vatican City.

Fan films like Benning's place studios in a quandary. Legally, they feel an obligation to defend their copyright, but from a promotions perspective, they see how fan films generate and maintain interest in their products in ways that no amount of money can buy. Benning's latest fan doc is called Raiding the Lost Ark. It focuses on the first Lucas-produced, Steven Spielberg-directed Indiana Jones film.

"The new Raider documentary is the same blend of admiration, affection and a degree of appraisal," says Stock, "But it is more sophisticated in its use of material." This time around, Benning has created original elements like interviews with actors and technicians who worked on the film, as well as animated reconstructions of scenes that were never shot. Raiding the Lost Ark debuted February 6 on Vimeo and sounds like it will serve up another slice of geek heaven.

George Clooney is nominated for two Oscars this year — for his lead role in The Descendants and for co-writing the adapted screenplay for The Ides Of March, which he also directed. He speaks to Robert Siegel on today's All Things Considered about film, but also about the life he lives as one of Hollywood's most famous men.

Clooney didn't start out as famous as he is now. He did quite a bit of episodic television — including roles on both The Facts Of Life and a comedy that was, believe it or not, called E/R before, at 33, he was cast as Dr. Doug Ross on the drama ER. His television stardom took him first to film roles in straightforward entertainment like Batman And Robin, One Fine Day (a romantic comedy with Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Peacemaker (an action film with Nicole Kidman), and then to three films in the space of a couple of years whose screenplays were nominated for Oscars: Out Of Sight, Three Kings, and O Brother, Where Art Thou? He was later nominated for both directing and co-writing 2005's Good Night, And Good Luck, and for his performances in Syriana (for which he won in the supporting category), Michael Clayton, and Up In The Air.

Clooney says that taking the role he did in The Descendants — one a bit more rumpled and at loose ends than audiences typically see from him — came down to the screenplay and the fact that director Alexander Payne, known for films like Election and Sideways, "really hadn't made a bad film, and I wanted to work with him." In places, including a scene where Clooney's character dashes in distress from his home and runs down the street in flip-flops, there's a chance of looking silly — of "clowning it too much," as Siegel puts it. Again, Clooney says, it's about who you're working with. "It would be hard if you didn't trust the director," he says. "There's a very big difference between doing that for Alexander Payne and doing it for someone that you don't trust. Because the product that you're selling out there is you."

 

And what Clooney is selling is changing somewhat. Asked about comments he's made that he's moving away from certain kinds of roles, he starts with a gentle poke at his superhero past: "I'm not going to do any more films in rubber suits, I've decided." But he isn't joking: "Growing old on screen is not for the faint of heart," he says. "There's a certain cruelty to being on a big screen as your eyelids start to sag and your hair falls out and turns gray that you either have to be able to handle or not. What you can't do is try to force yourself into roles that you could have played or would have played ten years earlier. You have to constantly be looking forward." That means better scripts, he says, and also directing and writing — "something you can do well into your old age."

What George Clooney also deals with and will deal with for many years is fame. Asked what his level of recognizability feels like, he points out how constant the attention to his every move has gotten to be. "I'll ride my motorcycle into the Swiss Alps to the top of a mountain to a tiny little bistro that we accidentally find, and by the time I've had coffee and a croissant, there's 40 people outside because of cell cameras." For him, the presence of cameras in the hands of every observer doesn't just mean too much attention and too much recording; it means the loss of the ability to experience things directly.

"I've walked with very famous people down red carpets over to the crowd of thousands of people," he says, "and you'll reach out to shake their hand and they've got a camera in their hand. And they don't even get their hand out, because they're recording the whole time. And you can tell people that you recorded Brad Pitt, but it would be very hard for you to say you actually met him, because you were watching it all through your phone. I think that's too bad, because I think people are experiencing less and recording more." And it's a problem everywhere: "The trick is to get them not to do it when you go to the bathroom."

Clooney may be very famous, but he's clearly not been without his setbacks — including Batman & Robin — which, Siegel notes, keeps coming up. "Failures are infinitely more instructive than successes." He explains that it was a new-ish thing to be offered a role as large as Batman at that point in his career. He says he learned that as an actor, he would be held responsible not only for his own acting, but also for the entire film and how good it was — and that's what led him to those films with the Oscar-nominated scripts.

And, undoubtedly, helped lead him to start writing Oscar-nominated scripts himself.

If you are a book lover with an unquenchable taste for kitschy Victoriana, good news: this week, the world has finally caught up with your interests. The occasion: the bicentennial of Charles Dickens's birth on February 7, 2012.

In the United Kingdom, the United States, and in countries around the globe, the event is being celebrated with some of the seriousness you'd expect — with readings, exhibitions and special issues of journals (e.g. the Cahiers victoriens et edouardiens, which gravely announced its editors' intention "to assess the Inimitable's presence in our times"). But it is also bringing giddier pleasures. Starting Tuesday, you could download a new Celebrating Dickens app for your smartphone and click on a cartoonish Google Doodle; by Tuesday night, you could track "Charles Dickens" as it trended on Twitter, along with "Ricky Martin" and "#10sexiestmales." In San Mateo, a Charles Dickens Bicentennial Ball featured quadrille dancing and "a light Olde English snack buffet"; across the country in Lowell, Mass., a museum hosted a Dickens-themed "Steampunk Soirée." ("How do steampunks dance?" a friend wondered.) Then there's the merch: in addition to any of a host of new books about the man, you can also buy a Dickens bicentenary hoodie, ringer T-shirt or bag in which to tote your Oliver Twist. So profuse are the events and products and publications that it takes a few moments to grasp that a Daily Mail listing for a noontime yodeling of key passages from "A Christmas Carol" is likely in jest.

As that sly announcement suggests, some observers do feel that the anniversary hype has gotten out of hand. British writer and critic Jenny Diski was sick of the thing practically before it began: "By two o'clock on New Year's Day in this Dickens bicentennial year, I already found myself wishing that either he or I had never been born," she wrote with endearing crankiness in the Guardian last month. And there is something to this. In addition to being famous for being famous, like some Real Housewife of the Nineteenth Century, didn't Dickens write a few novels?

In truth, though, it's hard to imagine an author better able to stand up to this kind of excessive popular celebration. Though time and inclusion on high school curricula has lent him a highbrow gloss, Dickens has been a writer of mass popularity since the serialization of his first novel, The Pickwick Papers. Even when he was alive, his work inspired theatrical productions and caricatures and bootleg editions and enormous parties: on his first visit to America in 1842, the thirty-year-old Dickens was already so famous that thousands of New Yorkers turned out to fete him at a lavish "Boz Ball" at the Park Theatre. (Dickens apparently enjoyed the dancing, then got sick, as authors on busy book tours still do, and was laid up for three days.)

Upon his death in 1870, crowds mourned this literary icon as if they'd known him; as Longfellow wrote, "It is no exaggeration to say that this whole country is stricken with grief." And the first centennial of Dickens's birth was marked with no less fanfare (or commercialism) than the second. Though smartphone apps and hoodies were in shorter supply, 1912 fans could purchase commemorative Dickens centenary stamps or jigsaw puzzles depicting Dickens stagecoach scenes—the moment when David Copperfield arrives in London, say. There were starry performances, some which doubled as fundraisers for Dickens's impoverished family. One packed Carnegie Hall tribute on Feb. 7, 1912, featured readings of letters in praise of Dickens by Winston Churchill and Henry Cabot Lodge, as well as recitations from the novels. As a climactic chapter from Little Dorrit was read aloud, women wept, the New York Times reported. "The crying went on as uninterruptedly as the reading until the chapter was finished, and then the crying women dried their eyes and applauded, and the men cheered."

But let's say you're impatient with all the cheering and dancing and crying, with the trinkets and parties. Say you just want people to read Dickens's work. This might still be the most effective way to make them suddenly decide to do so. As the number of books released every year continues to swell, and the publishing industry considers how the heck to attract a large audience to any particular title, the passionate, word-of-mouth publicity campaign has become a holy grail. I can think of only one living author capable of inspiring a collective global audience to stay up, put on costumes and talk excitedly about fictional characters: J.K. Rowling, a writer who is definitely not having a problem with readership. If, two centuries after his birth, Dickens can still inspire that kind of frenzy, the pro-reading lobby has no reason to do anything but celebrate.

Still, notably, some of the best public tributes to Dickens have been the ones closely bound up with the novels themselves. I've particularly enjoyed Radhika Jones's day-by-day countdown of her top ten Dickens novels on the Time.com website, for instance, revealing enough of the plots both to delight those who know the books and to intrigue those who haven't yet dived in. These confiding, informal accounts make you want to curl up and read, or reread, the books.

Maybe the Google Doodle will nudge someone to read a Dickens novel, too. But another recent technological development is even more likely to make that happen: these books are now free. They are not just in the public domain and thus available in dozens of cheap paperback editions (though you may prefer these gorgeous Penguin Classics hardcovers); not just a guaranteed presence in the collection of your local library; but also freely available electronically. These days, you don't have to buy a ticket to Carnegie Hall or even a book: you can just download one of these novels onto your phone and start on page 1.

This strikes me as an incredible gift. Amid all the mourning for our distracted, degraded cultural life, never as good as it used to be, a week where everyone reminds each other to read Dickens, for free? Sign me up. I may not have made it to the steampunk ball (although I hope you did and will tell me all about it), but I did happily spend the evening with a paperback copy of Bleak House — and for the inspiration to do so, I'd like to thank the Dickens hype machine.

This weekend marks the release of The Vow, which is not based on a Nicholas Sparks novel, despite having all the gauzy, drowsy look of a Sparks creation. Based on the real-life story of Kim and Krickitt Carpenter, The Vow tells the tale of a woman (Rachel McAdams) who loses part of her memory after a head injury and doesn't remember her husband (Channing Tatum). The trailer shows you the terrible moment where she remembers him so little that she assumes he's part of her medical team, which didn't apparently happen in real life.

[Note: Perhaps the best line I've heard about this movie comes from my pal Tara Ariano, who noted on Twitter, "The hilarious thing about The Vow is that, even for one second and with a head injury, Rachel McAdams thinks Channing Tatum is a doctor."]

What's remarkable about this particular trailer is how many romantic-drama cliches are crammed into a two-minute tease, other than amnesia itself. (Cliches about the treatment of amnesia, however, are allowed.) Let's count them.

1. Quirky wedding where quirky friend is wearing top hat

2. Wacky and romantic escape from the authorities

3. Kiss in front of city buildings

4. Trying on hats while

5. Smearing food on each other

6. Skinny-dipping while

7. Man picks up woman and she shrieks

8. Man serves breakfast

9. Man uses food to communicate feelings

10. Woman doesn't understand man's attempt to (sort of) propose

11. Man wears understanding cable-knit sweater

12. Thoughtful narration by romantic man

13. Happy dancing

14. Kiss delivered while tenderly grabbing face of partner

15. Couple lying in rumpled sheets

16. Couple kissing in the snow

17. Terrible accident

18. Amnesiac woman is like, "Who are you?"

19. Amnesiac woman pulls back from man's touch

20. Man frustratedly runs hands through hair

21. Man slumps miserably to floor in artsy wide shot

22. Woman sits on table to denote feeling scattered

23. Woman sits among photographs to bathe herself in memories

24. Credits strain for prestige state Rachel McAdams is "from The Notebook" (which: for this audience, sure), and that Channing Tatum is "from Dear John" (which: better than She's The Man, I suppose)

25. Woman watches video of herself to ponder her life

26. Man and woman have earnest discussion while in formalwear in outdoor location strung with twinkle lights

27. Woman walks in slow-motion in the snow wearing adorable fuzzy hat

28. Man stands with tear teetering on eyelid

29. Man asks ponderous rhetorical question about their relationship

30. On-screen question recasts highly personal story in emptiest, most generic terms possible

31. Couple shares box of candy

32. Man smiles lovingly

33. At reflection of wife in window

34. In the rain

35. Man punches rival (HEY, IT'S SCOTT SPEEDMAN! WHY ISN'T THIS MOVIE ABOUT HIM?)

36. Man runs earnestly and urgently

37. Man kisses woman's cold hands

38. Man and woman conclude song they've been singing.

One movie, one trailer, two minutes, 38 cliches on top of amnesia. That is impressive.

The very first time we ever saw 30 Rock's Liz Lemon, she was standing in line at a hot dog cart when a man walked up, cut in line, and created chaos. Her response: She bought all the hot dogs on the cart and distributed them to the people who had waited in line — "the good people," she called them — before taking the leftovers to work with her. It was a ridiculous thing to do, but it was an example of her extreme efforts to create order from disorder. She just wanted everybody to behave so she could get a hot dog in peace.

In early days, that's what Liz was all about. Saddled with flaky friend Jenna Maroney, pompous new boss Jack Donaghy, and genuinely bizarre new star Tracy Jordan, she desperately tried to keep everything from spinning out of control while always being about a millimeter from the edge herself. The first season included episodes like "Jack-Tor" and "Jack The Writer," both of which found Jack imposing himself on the creative process and needing Liz to run interference. And in "Tracy Does Conan," she scrambled to save Tracy from making a fool out of himself.

Of course, as much as comedy often seems to run on exaggeration, it largely runs on balance, and Liz certainly took her share of ridicule — bad dates, panic over dying alone, and a terrible boyfriend who still sold pagers and refused to move out because he claimed "squatter's rights." One of the best moments of the first season came when Jack met that terrible boyfriend and then dryly held up all his fingers while pointing and mouthing, "Ten." Jack's advice at that time often came from being shocked at Liz's willingness to settle for less than she deserved. Why, he seemed to wonder, was she thinking so small?

Now, in the sixth season, everything is different.

 

A recent storyline featuring James Marsden as Criss, Liz's boyfriend who drove a hot-dog truck, was very reminiscent of Dennis the pager salesman. But this time, she didn't break up with him because Jack gave her the side-eye and forced her to come to terms with the fact that she didn't want him. She broke up with him because Jack appeared to her as an apparition — her spirit guide, basically — and mocked Criss, mostly for not having any money. So Liz desperately went to Jack's office and said, "Say you approve of Criss, Jack," despite the fact that Jack had never met him. "You are technically an adult; you can do whatever you want," Jack told her. But later, he handed Criss a card with a black dot on it to declare himself "officially disapproving," and Liz caved. And then Jack literally handed her a card with a gold star on it, just like you would do with a small child. Later, she weaseled her way back toward Criss in what she believed was secrecy (don't let dad find out!), but Jack saw, and he approached Criss to offer the card that meant "probation." Liz, of course, doesn't understand that as always, Jack is a step ahead of her.

Over the course of six seasons, Jack has been fully transformed into a condescending, all-knowing daddy, and Liz has been fully transformed into a needy little girl who is eternally terrified of displeasing him. She's always had a grudging respect for him, but now she simply reveres him and trusts his judgment more than hers. She was once frazzled but smart, harried but competent, capable of wrangling a bunch of crazy people and then slumping at the end of the day, exhausted but minimally victorious. Now, she's just dumb, incapable of making her own decisions, and her relationship with Jack is entirely out of balance.

It's a common problem in comedy series that relationships and characters gradually have their funniest qualities exaggerated to the point where, ironically, they're no longer funny. There was always a strong element of bizarro mentoring in Jack's relationship with Liz — a twisted version of Lou Grant and Mary Richards. It led to some of the show's strongest moments. But as they stand now, Liz is as clueless and lost as Tracy and Jenna, and her once-grounded friendship with Pete (Scott Adsit), who was her one nominally sane ally, is essentially gone.

This is, as a friend of mine recently noted, the opposite of what Parks And Recreation did with Leslie Knope. She's been fleshed out from a cartoonishly goofy boss to a warmly devoted — but still funny and skewed — public servant. Her relationship with Ron Swanson has become more equal, more respectful, with more give-and-take, and that's all made the show funnier and better.

There's always been such an absurdist tone to 30 Rock that it's been able to get away with a lot of ridiculous behavior and silly plotlines. But at its core, initially, was a likable, smart, profoundly flawed woman trying her hardest to navigate all manner of show-business nuttiness that surrounded her. Now, she just seems flattened and robbed of everything that made her relatable.

Since its return a few weeks ago, 30 Rock has been suffering from some very, very low ratings. Given the enormous talent that's involved, including the award-winning Tina Fey and Alec Baldwin, it may be time to think about when this show has run its course. Liz seems to be aging backwards into childhood, after all, and she doesn't have much further to go.

Madonna is just about the only thing I remember about the Super Bowl last night, and interestingly, it made me think about the fact that she's just about the only thing I remember about Live Aid, which was more than 25 years ago.

Notwithstanding the specific images that would come to define her — Marilyn Madonna, dominatrix Madonna, Evita Madonna — this was just a young, magnetic singer, clearly not lip-synching, dancing in her heavy, shoulder-padded jacket in front of a crowd that was drenched in sweat. This was July 1985, after "Like A Virgin" colonized MTV, after the underwear-as-outerwear, right before she married Sean Penn. She was already a capital-T Thing, but this was really just singing and dancing, and anyone who comes to think of her as purely an imagined concoction, all elaborate hat and no cattle, someone who never existed outside of videos, is misremembering.

All the other business, from the erotic photography book to the kiss with Britney Spears to the Super Bowl halftime show — that's all what she decided to do with being Madonna after she'd already done it, but it's not how she got to be Madonna, not originally. She got to be Madonna making enormously danceable music and being great to watch. The first video of hers that made an impression on me is surprisingly free of affectation; it's largely a cornball soap opera, just like most of the other videos of the time.

If you'd been able to put down money that day in July 1985 on whether she would be playing the Super Bowl halftime show more than 26 years later, and if you'd actually done it, you'd probably be rich now. Her chances for longevity were widely regarded as so slim as to be an available joke. My favorite TV show then was Moonlighting, and I remember an episode they did somewhere around this time about recovering a lost Rolodex full of famous names. In negotiating for its return, David Addison (Bruce Willis) asked for just a few of the cards back if he couldn't have the whole thing. Maybe he could just have the M section, he suggested. Or maybe just Madonna. "Nobody's going to want her number next year anyway," he said.

But here she is, 53 years old, it's four presidents later, and she's still a headliner. Granted, she's a headliner at the halftime show, an event that's shifted more and more toward legacy artists like The Who, Bruce Springsteen, and Tom Petty. It's tempting to attribute the nasty Twitter commentary about how she allegedly looked old and haggard — really? — to unreasonable expectations placed upon women around aging, but honestly, Mick Jagger gets the same thing. The Who got it, Bob Dylan gets it, Tom Petty gets it. It's part and parcel of aging in front of the people who once bounced your work off of their youth to discern its shape and now aren't interested in seeing whatever may be reflected in your not looking exactly like you used to.

What's curious, given how much "ewww, she's too old" stuff went around on Twitter, is that everything she did Sunday night is exactly what it should mean to age gracefully. She did what she loves and what she's always been good at: infectiously danceable pop in high-energy production numbers, assisted by lots of dancers. She looked happy. She embraced younger performers including Nicki Minaj and M.I.A., both of whom share her penchant for self-invention and both of whom are on her new single. She even made judicious choices when picking hits to perform. "Like A Virgin" might be the go-to song when Ricky Gervais wants to make a joke about her at the Golden Globes, but she's right to have relegated it to the background these days in favor of better stuff like "Vogue," which remains an irresistible confection.

Certainly the halftime show, as everyone knew it would, delivered a certain amount of over-the-top nonsense, as has been required of Super Bowl halftime shows stretching back to the days when they used to feature Up With People. (Those shirtless dudes hauling Madonna with ropes may have been silly, but they are no sillier than Indiana Jones And The Vince Lombardi Trophy.) And having the words "WORLD PEACE" appear in lights at the end was probably the only thing she could do that would be sillier than all that had come before.

It's not that Madonna is the embodiment of grace for anyone else. She's done some ridiculous things, and she's picked up such hilarious affectations along the way that you can refer to a vague British accent of unknown origin as "doing a Madonna" and you can expect to be understood. But this version of Madonna, I think, is grace for her.

There was always going to be a Madonna At 53, alongside those Marilyn and Evita Madonnas. And really, what could it have looked like, other than this? What was she supposed to be at this point? Invisible? Was she supposed to abandon the dance pop to which she so palpably loved shaking her shoulders in a stadium in Philadelphia in 1985 and start singing standards? Would that not have invited a different kind of criticism, that she had gone all cruise-ship on us?

It's awfully hard to endure in public, particularly if your image tends to be big rather than little. It's hard to avoid a series of unwinnable arguments — you've changed too much; you haven't changed enough. You look old; you're trying too hard to look young. You won't accept that you're older; you've lost all the charm of your youth. But more than a quarter-century after she stubbornly danced in that ridiculously heavy jacket in all that jangly jewelry, Madonna seems to have figured out, if nothing else, how not to worry about it.

We kick off this week's show (our 75th!) exactly where you'd expect to find us: having a thorough debate about the merits and demerits of NBC's heavily hyped new series Smash, which will debut on regular television on Monday night, but which you can find on Hulu or iTunes right now, if you're curious (and if those services are available to you). How's the music? How's the acting? How's American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee? We ask all these questions and more, and we let you hear some of the music.

In our B segment this week, we turn a microphone over to new PCHH pal and new-ish NPR.org books editor Parul Sehgal, who introduces herself with perhaps the greatest first words in the history of PCHH. She helps us talk about the hierarchy of book publishing and the entire matter of reading fiction thoughtfully and with your senses and reading (as some of us — cough — do) with the sense that you're supposed to be finding the right answer and might be failing. (If you've never read Monkey See's coverage of reading Moby-Dick, you'll hear us refer to it, and you can find both the goofy and ponderous sections in the archives.) Parul also has an actual book recommendation for you, although you'll have to wait a bit to read it.

As always, we wrap up with what's making us happy this week, including the return once again of Stephen's increasingly culturally adroit children, Twitter accounts we hope are real, casting a seemingly familiar political figure, and lots more.

Remember to find us on Facebook — that's where we try to answer questions and follow up on your thoughts from the show. And of course, you can follow us on Twitter: me, Stephen, Trey, Glen, Mike, and our new smarty-pants pal, Parul.

With the Super Bowl looming, three questions are buzzing around America: Who are you pulling for; who's singing at halftime; and where are you watching the game? And if you're hosting a party, you're also asking yourself: What am I going to feed these people?

So it's a good time to highlight a basic lesson of hosting: Nothing classes up a party — even one that's focused on watching football on TV — like good cheese.

And as I learned recently, nothing tastes better with cheese than beer. That's the word from Garrett Oliver, author of The Brewmaster's Table, an influential book about how to make beer-food relationships work.

When I called Oliver to ask which cheeses and beers are simpatico, he was traveling around to support his more recent work: the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Beer, which he edited. In what may be the most enviable book tour I've ever heard of, Oliver hosts "tasting dinners" for audiences at craft breweries and restaurants around the U.S.

Oliver's beer and cheese pairings have been honed by numerous competitions, in which he faces off with wine experts to see who can pick the best beverage to go with a variety of cheeses.

"I've done a lot of competitions against sommeliers," he says. "And I always win. In fact, there are a number of wine books that actually mention that beer is easier to pair with cheese than wine is. And I think it's undoubtedly true."

We started talking about why that might be. I asked Oliver whether beer's carbonation might help cleanse the palate after you've eaten a hunk of creamy cheese.

"That's definitely true," he says. "It's got a cutting power. I mean, it's a physical scrubbing action. I call it 'scrubbing bubbles' — you know, literally, lift some of that fat off your palate. Whereas, famously, cheese is quite mouth-coating, and often doesn't even allow you to taste the wine."

And then there are the essential ingredients. Beer can be made from a wide range of malted grains, hops, and yeast, along with other add-ins, such as fruits and spices. That's where it can pull ahead of wine, says Oliver, who is also the brewmaster at Brooklyn Brewery.

"For example, if we want to take the malt and smoke it, we can make a smoked beer," Oliver says. "We can caramelize the malts; we can roast them like coffee beans, and make a beer that tastes like coffee, or chocolate. Or, you can make a beer that's 3 percent (alcohol), and slightly acidic, and is much lighter and delicate than any wine, and tastes completely different. Brewing is more like cooking; it can taste like almost anything."

By contrast, wine relies on a single ingredient — grapes, as either a single breed or a blend of several breeds — for its basic flavor profile. Other qualities are derived from how it's stored and aged — in oak barrels, for instance.

"That's not to say there's not a big difference between gewürztraminer and chardonnay," Oliver says. "But it's not as broad as the difference between IPA and stout."

Still, Oliver notes that an individual wine can be very complex. And he stresses that he's not trying to say you can't pair cheese with wine — just that it's not as easy as it looks.

"It's less about harmony than about contrast. Wine is very good at doing contrast. Beer is very good at doing harmony with food, including cheeses," Oliver says. "If you really do it well, with the beer, you can have the harmony and the contrast at the same time. And that's what gives some of those pairings a great lift."

Here's a guide to some of his favorites:

Or, if you prefer a quick short-hand list, here you are:

• Fresh Goat Cheese and Saison
• Sheep's Milk Cheese and Brown Ale
• Stilton Blue Cheese and Stout
• Farmhouse Cheddar and IPA
• Epoisses or Taleggio and "Brett" beers (sour or wild ales)

We used Oliver's suggestions to set up an informal taste test here at NPR — well, it was a photo shoot, and then people realized we had beer and cheese in the office, and things just kind of went that way.

Oliver didn't name specific brands for his pairings, so I took the opportunity to get together some of my favorite beers, and to try others for the first time.

People loved a pairing of taleggio and Mikkeller Nelson Sauvin Brut, a craft beer that includes subtle New Zealand hops along with Brettanomyces, a wild yeast that imparts musty, grassy notes that are often referred to as "barnyard."

"Those funky, earthy flavors tend to be very nice with washed-rind cheeses, like Epoisses, Taleggio, and cheeses like that," Oliver says.

Another favorite was the Stillwater Stateside Saison, along with Capriole's Sofia goat cheese.

"With fresh goat cheeses, as opposed to aged goat cheeses, saisons work very well," Oliver says. "They're bright; they're citrusy, they're super dry; they're slightly tangy."

The dry Stateside and delicate Sofia both drew raves as people went back and forth between the two. And the cheese got bonus points because it was made in Indiana, where the Super Bowl will be played.

If all this fancy-cheese talk sounds a little high-brow to you, think of it this way: Super Bowl XLVI will be an expensive spectacle, in which millionaires compete on a field enclosed by a stadium named for an oil company. The broadcast will include Madonna, in a halftime show that has ties to Cirque du Soleil.

So if you're hoping to preserve the grass-roots simplicity of football, my friend, not only has that horse left the barn — it's voguing its way down Main Street.

And if you're hosting a party, you must confront a few essential truths: Some of your guests only want to see the commercials and the halftime show; others are bored by the idea of a rematch of the 2008 game; still others, I recently learned, only want to see guys running around in tight pants.

Taken together, all this means that this is the year for your Super Bowl spread to really shine, for you to show that you've put some thought into your menu — even if it just gives people more reasons to eat good cheese and have a nice beer.

The best part is that cheese takes almost no preparation time. If your repertoire of culinary skills includes unwrapping a block and placing it on a plate next to some crackers, you're good to go.

If you'd like to round out your menu with foods specific to Indiana, Michele Kayal has written up how to do that, for our Kitchen Window recipe series.

"Poetry" and "money" are rarely found in the same sentence, unless a practitioner of the former is lamenting his dearth of the latter. Most poets get by on odd jobs, occasional grants, adjunct teaching, snippets of journalism or — in the case of the poet-undertaker Thomas Lynch — preserving dead bodies.

For Timothy Donnelly, however, money will be a little easier to come by, at least for a few years. Yesterday Donnelly, who teaches at Columbia and Princeton, was awarded the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, which is administered by Claremont Graduate University and carries with it a cash prize of $100,000. Along with the Poetry Foundation's Ruth Lilly Prize, it's one of the largest awards given solely for poetry in the United States, if not the world. Donnelly received the prize for his collection The Cloud Corporation, which was published by Wave Books in September of 2010.

The Kingsley Tufts Prize is given to a poet in mid-career (Donnelly is 42), which means that it's usually going to someone with three or four books under his or her belt. But The Cloud Corporation is Donnelly's second book. His first, Twenty-Seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit, was published in 2003, after which Donnelly did something all too rare in the poetry world: He took his time.

That approach has paid off, and not just literally. The Cloud Corporation is a long, strange, often lovely book in which various antic contemporary tactics are used in counterpoint to a mood of intense melancholy. So, for instance, Donnelly gives us a poem called "Dream of Arabian Hillbillies" that is, as he puts it, "composed of words from successive pages of Osama Bin Laden's 'Declaration of War Against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places' and randomly from the theme song to The Beverly Hillbillies..." It's the kind of project that could easily be too cute for its own good. But here is the poem's conclusion:

...May you not cave in and weep deep. May wolves
not eat your wings. May your life
not be a lifelong movie of your life
but a steadfast becoming other than that

which you are: a slave to the power
fiddling among the hills of fed clouds and shaken
into wonderment like a shot horse barely
gathering will to lay down with it, y'hear?

In the best moments of The Cloud Corporation, there is a depression so rich that it takes on a kind of grandeur. Readers will have to hope that Donnelly's newest honor only lightens his mood when he's away from his desk.

Comic-book nerds are outraged today. In fairness, comic-book nerds are outraged much of the time — it's part of their charm. But today, there's a unifying focus to their teeth-gnashing, as DC Comics has announced plans for seven limited-run titles focusing on characters from its venerated Watchmen series, which ran for 12 issues in 1986 and 1987.

The comics, which will follow the adventures of the central costumed heroes in the years before the events of Watchmen take place, will be published under the unifying brand "Before Watchmen." Since DC has already used "After Watchmen" as the brand for a series of reissues of titles that followed in that landmark story's wake, the first safe conclusion is that DC likes slapping the word "Watchmen" on stuff.

The Internet, as you could imagine, hit Defcon 2. People who are not comic-book fans might well wonder why this is any different from, say, the latest in a long line of Batman reboots that doesn't inspire outrage. People who are blog editors, for instance. [Hey! That naive question was between you and me. — Ed.]

I am here to help! Of course, I can't compete with the apoplectic howlings of the unhappiest of the comics bloggers, so I won't try. But I've talked about Watchmen before. I return to it every couple of years. And I am not here to tell you that "Before Watchmen" makes me, like so many others, angry at DC.

No, I am just here to tell you that "Before Watchmen" makes me think that DC is stupid, or at least it's acting stupid. Here are two — but not the only two — reasons why:

It shows that DC doesn't really understand Watchmen. The story of Watchmen goes back to when DC acquired a stable of heroes from Charlton Comics in the 1980s. They were handed over to writer Alan Moore to introduce them to a readership that might not have known who they were. The idea that Moore came up with for the characters was brilliant ... and so apocalyptic that it would have pretty much rendered them unusable afterwards. Since that's not really what DC had in mind when it shelled out good money for the Charlton stable, Moore reimagined the existing heroes as new standalone characters, while DC relaunched the likes of Charlton's Blue Beetle and the Question into its continuity.

In other words, not only was Watchmen never intended to be an ongoing series, that's precisely why the story was done as Watchmen and not just the Charlton heroes in the first place. It was produced as a single-shot, twelve-issue story using characters that had never existed prior to its publication and were never supposed to be used after. It was a self-contained novel with a beginning, a middle and an end, written with exactly that structure in mind. While Moore kicked around the idea of a prequel series around the same time, he ultimately rejected it as a dead end.

There's simply nothing in Watchmen that demands or even encourages the sort of infusion of new blood that ongoing series require every so often to remain relevant. Both its genesis and its final form explicitly argue against further elaboration. There are no other tales to be told in that world — none. That's the entire point. And mining it for material for what is essentially The Further Adventures Of The Minutemen (the Minutemen being the actual name of the superhero squad in the book) shows a stunning lack of comprehension by DC about one of their flagship literary properties. Speaking of which...

It risks devaluing Watchmen outside of comics fandom. Watchmen is very unusual in the world of comics, in that it's one of the few graphic novels known, read and loved by people who believe that comics are still just for kids, pow, zap, etc. And it's arguably the only work of graphic fiction in that lofty category, which, as the redoubtable Glen Weldon has mentioned in this space on multiple occasions, is primarily populated by nonfiction such as Maus and Persepolis.

So there are plenty of people who can't tell their Green Arrows from their Green Hornets who know that Watchmen is one of the landmark comic books. Maybe they even know that it was the only comic Time listed on its 2005 greatest-novels list.

To those somewhat comics-averse readers, "Before Watchmen" can serve only to dilute Watchmen's power as an ideal point of entry. It introduces market confusion where there was none before, dramatically increasing the chances that comics novices will pick up one of the new series without knowing the difference, be distinctly underwhelmed (even if the series themselves are done well, they are vanishingly unlikely to be as layered, intricate and powerful as the original) and dismiss as overrated the actual book that received all the accolades in the first place.

That doesn't just hurt Watchmen; that hurts comics. That's a new customer lost, having sought out something superlative and latched onto something inferior without realizing it and deciding that kids can keep their comics, thank you very much, blam, kablooey. And by marketing the titles under the "Before Watchmen" banner, DC is encouraging exactly that confusion, when it could really use the clarity of someone saying "You need to read Watchmen" without having to narrow it down to which Watchmen is which.

Look, there are plenty of reasons why today's announcement doesn't inspire confidence. (I'll start you off: Neither Moore nor Watchmen artist Dave Gibbons are to be found on the list of creative teams for any of the new "Before Watchmen" titles. You take it from there.) Raising most of them is tantamount to objecting to commerce being more highly valued than art, which is fair but, as always, futile. I'm less taken aback by the fact that DC is potentially screwing up Watchmen than by the fact that they apparently don't understand it or its value in the first place.

Also, if you think that there aren't howls of outrage every time Batman gets rebooted, you are adorable.

With the silent film The Artist in competition for this year's Best Picture Oscar, movie critic Bob Mondello has been thinking about the pre-talkie era. As it happens, the last silent film to win for Best Picture has just been released on Blu-ray: the 1927 flying-ace epic Wings.

Biplanes dive through clouds high above a World War I battlefield. Dogfights in the air, bombs on the ground, and all of it without special effects —Wings is an old-school epic, enormous in scope and basically real. The U.S. Army provided 220 planes, several thousand soldiers, tanks, artillery, and all sorts of logistical help.

There's a story, too, and it's a rouser. Two doughboys go off to war, both in love with the same girl. Rivals at first, they become friends, but then ... well, more you're not going to get from me. Suffice it to say there's a reason Wings won the first-ever Best Picture Oscar.

And that was the year The Jazz Singer brought sound to film, so Wings had to be bigger, better and louder, too. In big cities, it was accompanied by a full orchestra, with sound-effects guys in the theater to provide the roar of planes and bullets. To recreate that for the Blu-ray restoration, the filmmakers went back to the original shooting script and musical score — so they knew exactly where the sound effects should be, where the orchestra should burst into Mendelssohn for soaring flight scenes, and where the director wanted hand-painted yellow flames leaping from cockpits as planes went down. In an age of black-and-white silent film, those flames must have been astonishing.

When director William Wellman started working on Wings, Hollywood hadn't yet figured out how to film an air-war story. Most World War I planes, remember, were almost like kites, made of canvas and baling wire, and they were way too small to hold a cameraman and a pilot and an actor.

So Wellman bolted cameras directly to the planes and gave his 20-something stars flying lessons. In the making-of extras, Wellman's son remembers that leading man Charles "Buddy" Rogers, had never been in a plane in his life.

"They would go up in a two-seat plane, and there would be a 'safety' pilot who would duck down, and then the actors flew the plane," he says. "But you have fly those planes. You have a control stick, and you've got to work it to keep it in the air. My father said Buddy Rogers spent something like 98 hours in the air. When he would come down after shooting for a while, he would throw up."

Who could blame him? But the results are spectacular — flying footage that makes the green-screen trickery of modern films look downright lame.

Wings offers some down-to-earth pleasures, too: Gary Cooper in the bit part that kicked off his career, and Clara Bow, the It Girl, silently lighting up the screen. No wonder so many in the film industry despaired when big, clunky sound cameras came in, forcing everyone to stand in one place and talk into microphones. Spectacle and daredeviltry wouldn't make a comeback for years, but this one last time, Wings sure sent them soaring.

In comics news and rage news, DC has announced a set of prequels to Watchmen, and it will probably not surprise you to hear that creator Alan Moore thinks this is a pretty bad idea. [The New York Times]

Vanity Fair, not for the first time, is finding itself on the hot seat over including two women of color on its Hollywood issue, only to put them off to the right-hand side where they don't show on the cover when it's folded up. It may sound silly, but when you look at the entire series of similar covers, it really does seem weird that they keep pushing gorgeous people like Paula Patton and Anthony Mackie off to the side. [Jezebel]

Are you missing Adele since her surgery? Are you anxious to see whether any live appearance for the rest of her live can rival her Tiny Desk Concert? Well, you'll have another chance to see when she performs live at the Grammy Awards on February 12. This almost has to be the best thing about the Grammy Awards. [The Guardian]

There's some good advice at Lifehacker about giving some thought to your passwords on this, Change Your Password Day. (Hint: Don't change it to 12345.) [Lifehacker]

Tough economy? Not for auction houses, which are seeing huge numbers as they find investors "doubling down on art." Not in all cases, though: "The Degas was priced to sell in November for at least $25 million, but bidding stalled at $18.5 million." Heartbreak! Failure! [The Wall Street Journal]

If you haven't had anyone send you a message in the last couple of days asking you something like, "Have you seen the thing with Kristen Bell and the sloth?", you must have been taking a few days off from the internet. But if you were, here it is. [E! Online]

Jonathan Franzen's in the news again, this time talking about how e-books are chiseling away at the foundations of civilization as we know it. Absurd, isn't it? That the author of two of the better regarded novels of the past decade (give or take) would be concerned about how you read his books. The problem, according to Franzen, is manifold. E-books and digital readers are a con designed to rob you of money that you could otherwise be spending on paper books; e-books are trivial non-objects that you cannot hold and fetishize; print books are durable ("I can spill water on it and it would still work!" he is quoted as saying); and, most perniciously, e-books are supplanting the gorgeous permanence of book-books. "But I do fear that it's going to be very hard to make the world work if there's no permanence like that," Franzen said. "That kind of radical contingency is not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government."

Right. So. Read that again. That free copy of Moby-Dick you downloaded to your Kindle with the full intention of one day maybe starting to read it — that copy of Moby-Dick is the harbinger of some liberties-trampled nightmare world. Somehow.

Look. I think Jonathan Franzen is a talented novelist. I loved Freedom and The Corrections. I thought The Twenty-Seventh City was pretty damned good. But, whatever. People are allowed to say silly things. But can we please, please, please get past the e-books versus print books thing? Please?

There's really no need for a discussion about the technology any longer. Readers like the Kindle and Nook are great. They work. They're cheap. You can put a lifetime's worth of books on one — including a ton of public domain classics for a buck or less each. You can cobble together a virtual classics bookshelf for less than the cost of a round of drinks. Amazing.

Of course e-books aren't perfect. I am a scribbler, and you cannot scribble in the margins of an ebook. Not all books are available in digital editions (Martin Amis' Money, for instance, and most of Saul Bellow). E-books do not allow you to advertise your literary affectedness on the subway. And then there's the matter of all those barren bookshelves, in your home and at the soon-to-be-closed local independent bookseller.

Here's the thing: you don't have to be a print book person or an e-book person. It's not an either/or proposition. You can choose to have your text delivered on paper with a pretty cover, or you can choose to have it delivered over the air to your sleek little device. You can even play it way loose and read in both formats! Crazy, right? To have choice. Neither is better or worse — for you, for the economy, for the sake of "responsible self-government." We should worry less about how people get their books and — say it with me now! — just be glad that people are reading.

Awards season brings with it many things: the beautiful speech, the awkward speech, the mawkish montage, and the unforgivable snub. But it also brings one of the most profoundly silly rituals in celebrity culture: the red-carpet interview in which actors step up to be grilled, most commonly on E!, before they head into the venue.

For years, these chats were done by Joan Rivers, who specialized in later saying mean things about what everyone was wearing. This last part, she still does on a separate show. But Rivers is out of the red-carpet game, and much of E!'s coverage is now anchored by Ryan Seacrest, the man whose official job in Hollywood is Host Of Most Things, and whose unofficial job is Doing Things That Seem Like Stupid Jobs Until You See Other People Trying To Do Them And Realize Hey, I'll Be Darned, That Ryan Seacrest Knows Something. Seacrest does the Golden Globes, he does the Oscars, he does the Emmys ... essentially, he handles your high-end red-carpet events, such as they are. (Hey, everything has a high end. Even a very short fencepost.)

He did not, however, do the Screen Actors Guild Awards Sunday night, and that meant the coverage was primarily in the hands of his frequent co-host, E!'s Giuliana Rancic, who is an E! anchor and has her own reality show, making her both a deliverer and a maker of celebrity news. Assisted by Kelly Osbourne (of the Ozzy Osbournes) and Ross Mathews, another person who is famous for really no reason at all except that he used to be a character named "Ross The Intern" on Jay Leno's show, Rancic delivered some of the most awkward, cringe-worthy celebrity interviewing that's been offered in some time.

 

(If, by the way, you actually want to know who won, the big winners included the casts of Boardwalk Empire, Modern Family, and The Help, as well as Jean Dujardin of The Artist, Viola Davis of The Help, Alec Baldwin of 30 Rock, Jessica Lange of American Horror Story, Steve Buscemi of Boardwalk Empire, and Betty White of Hot In Cleveland.)

Right from the get-go, Rancic's uncomfortable-o-meter was cranked up to heaven. When Katrina Bowden of NBC's 30 Rock announced that she had just gotten engaged the previous night, Rancic wanted the details. Not just "How did it happen?", but "Where were you guys?", which led to the uncomfortable answer from Bowden's fiance, "We were just in a beautiful suite at the Four Seasons." DO YOU GET IT, GIULIANA? THEY WERE IN A HOTEL ROOM. Fortunately, she didn't ask what they were wearing, but I'll bet she thought about it. She did manage to ask of the ring, "So he picked it out all by himself?" Who knew a man could competently choose an engagement ring to offer to a woman as a gift? This is unheard of in the world in which you don't simply acquire things without consultation!

For sheer gender-role obnoxiousness, though, nothing could match Rancic's question to Steve Carell's wife, actress Nancy Walls. After learning what Walls was wearing, Rancic asked her, "Did Mr. Carell buy that for you?" Since this can hardly mean she envisioned Steve Carell picking out the dress Pretty Woman-style, it suggests that if a married woman owns something expensive, it's because her husband decided to front her the money. Just a note: Steve Carell's wife is blonde, but she is not Blondie and he is not Dagwood and it's not the 1950s and seriously, Giuliana Rancic, don't do that.

Rancic also displayed a strange affinity for prying personal questions that jarred even the most unflappable celebrities. Viola Davis is a pretty cool character, but when Rancic followed up a question about Davis' daughter, whom she adopted in October, with a question about whether Davis and her husband want to have more kids, the look on Davis' face ... well. It's here at the 1:15 mark. It must be seen to be fully appreciated.

Did you miss it? Okay. Here's a screenshot.

It went on and on. Rancic announced to Kyra Sedgwick that most celebrity couples seem to split up and asked for the secret to her long and successful relationship with Kevin Bacon, despite acknowledging that she has asked Sedgwick this question before and has been told that there isn't a secret. She asked Michelle Williams, who tends to be particularly private about her daughter (whose father was Heath Ledger) where her daughter is when she comes to events like this. She asked Jonah Hill to elaborate on his exasperation with the contemptuous way the E! announcers reacted to his Oscar nomination for Moneyball, which ... he did. She got this face from Modern Family's Sofia Vergara after mentioning that Vergara announced at the Golden Globes that she wasn't wearing underwear.

In fairness to Rancic, ABC agrees that Vergara, though she now insists she in fact wore very "tiny panties," indeed disavowed any underwear backstage at the Globes. But that is still a great, great face that contributed to the sense that everything was entirely off the rails.

Then there was Kristen Wiig. Wiig has already said publicly that she's not interested in pursuing Bridesmaids 2, and that she and her writing partner Annie Mumolo are working on another project. Rancic nonetheless asked her about Bridesmaids 2. Wiig said, once again, that she was flattered that people were interested, but she was moving on. "But have you closed the door on Bridesmaids 2?" Rancic persisted. Wiig, who probably can't keep the studio from going on without her and therefore can't technically say there won't be another movie: "I don't really know what's going to happen, but as far as my involvement right now, I'm doing something else." Rancic: "So, no plans on it quite yet."

Red-carpet interviews are supposed to be frivolous fun. They're supposed to be a moment where you get to look at a dress or a tux and argue with people over whether you like it or not (Davis' dress was great; Wiig really needed to lose the choker), and where you can see happy people with their happy spouses and occasionally an adorable mom. It's not supposed to feel like a Christopher Guest movie, but this really was Rancic in the role of Catherine O'Hara.

Ryan Seacrest is an easy man to doubt, just generally, but I doubt he would ever have asked anyone whether they want more kids, and I think he would have taken no for an answer from Kristen Wiig, and I am almost entirely certain that he would not have suggested to Steve Carell's wife that she asks her husband for spending money.

Hey, Ryan? Make sure you come back for the Oscars. We can't take this again.

Imax is into what's big and splashy; it only makes sense that they'd be looking to get into Bollywood. [The Hollywood Reporter]

E-books are part of a loss of permanency that is "not compatible with a system of justice or responsible self-government." So says Jonathan Franzen. [The Guardian]

On the other hand, e-publishing of erotica is really taking off, so if we don't have justice or responsible self-government, at least we'll have plenty of distractions. Bread, circuses, and hubba-hubba. [CBC]

I firmly believe that questions like "What Really Famous Book Should Be Cut Down So It's A Lot Shorter?" are only asked as bait for those who enjoy indignant spluttering, but I have to hand it to The Guardian for asking a similar question in a way that left lots of flexibility: It only took two posts for someone to change the subject to spluttering about Facebook. [The Guardian]

This story makes my face melt, just because: Jekyll & Hyde returns to Broadway, starring Constantine Maroulis, the frog-lipped crooner who once came in sixth on American Idol and is now, undeniably, a Thing. Specifically, he is both Jekyll and Hyde. I am defeated. [The New York Times]

Still looking for Oscar prognostication advice? Michel Hazanavicius of The Artist took home the Director's Guild award this weekend, and while that's not a perfect predictor, when you combine it with the rest of the tea leaves, it makes the film a pretty persuasive Best Picture favorite. [Slashfilm]