Saturday Sidebar Update. Still on Sunday!

I've been in love with Julianne Nicholson ever since The Love Letter, a very funny and overlooked romantic comedy in which she was the tomboy-next-door who pined after her oblivious best friend. I know, sounds a little Some Kind of Wonderful-y, but it's really not. It's a damn entertaining movie. And she's so damn loveable in it. She was also in The Others, a cancelled-too-soon TV series from Glen Morgan and James Wong, who were responsible for many of the best X-Files episodes. You probably know her, if you know her at all, from the last season of Ally McBeal. Her inclusion here has nothing whatsoever to do with the purely coincidental discovery that her film Her Name Is Carla (coming out on DVD this month) contains her first nude scenes. Well, maybe a little.

Still reading the Kotzwinkle book. It's very weird, and very funny, which is exactly what I want from him.

Still haven't watched that damn Harry Potter movie. I did see Mr. & Mrs. Smith, which I got a kick out of, but for a dissenting viewpoint, here is a quote from my buddy Forrest: "I would take a shit on this movie if I could." Okay then!

One of my favorite hard-rocking bands is Therapy?. And yes, that question mark is part of the band's name. Troublegum would very likely make my desert island album list in the "ferociously ass-kicking music" slot. Therapy? are a bunch of fine Irish lads from Belfast, and Troublegum opens with five songs so tremendously, furiously rocking, I'd be hard-pressed to name very many other albums whose first five songs are all so uniformly excellent. If I wrote a horror movie, Troublegum's "Knives" would play over the opening credits.

Switched things up a bit this week. What would normally fill my "Hating" slot, a television network's programming choices, ends up making me very very happy instead. NBC has decided to shelve Joey and The Apprentice for the foreseeable future, and will be moving My Name Is Earl and The Office to the 9:00 Thursday slot, which should be the first step of the network's return to Thursday night excellence. NBC has largely gone to shit since they abandoned their years-long tradition of a four-sitcom block of programming to open Thursday night, and this move gives me hope. Plus, Scrubs is at long last scheduled to return, on January 3rd. Damn, NBC, keep this up and I might think you actually give a shit about airing and rewarding quality programming!

The song lyric came by random chance. No, really: I had my mp3 player on "random," and this Cake song came up. "End of the Movie" is a very nice, very simple and stark, very short little song about life, and getting through it, and it makes me want to go buy some Cake albums. I think I'll do that this week.