Paper Chace


Covers to volumes 1 through 4 of Queen and Country Definitive Editions, each with black-&-white close-ups of main character with trade dress in orange, blue, red, and green respectively

Rachel Maddow was on Late Night with Seth Myers recently, and to my surprise among the topics they discussed was Greg Rucka’s Queen and Country.

Suit Up


Profile view of Grant Gustin in the Flash cowl/mask/helmet with lightning bolts over ears

We got a (nearly) full look today at the suit Grant Gustin will be wearing as Barry
Allen in the upcoming CW Flash series.

Feed Me Rewrite!


I was finally successful this year in not writing about the Oscars before or after the telecast. The bad news is that this wasn’t due purely to willpower; I’ve been sitting on this post for a while with the aim of running it on, as they say, Movies’ Biggest Night, but I couldn’t.

Sometime last year I came up with a couple of the following lines and realized that the concept would make a fun hashtag game. What you do is take a reasonably well-known quote from books or films and substitute one or two words with food. I’m very rarely on Twitter anymore, though, so I ended up just brainstorming a bit and setting the list aside to run on the blog as my...

Top Twenty Supermarket Lines of Dialogue

20. “All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my cold cuts.”

19. “Nobody puts baked beans in a corner.”

18. “Take your stinking pasta off me, you damn dirty apes!”

17. “It was the best of thymes, it was the worst of thymes.”

Harold Ramis 1944-2014


Harold Ramis, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and  Ernie Hudson in 'Ghostbusters' firing red and blue streams of energy from their proton-pack guns
Ghostbusters screencap © 1984 Columbia Pictures.

The year is 1989. I’m a day-camp counselor for kids 5 to 6 years old. At that age
boys have their favorite whatevers on their lunch boxes, their shirts, their underwear. Ghostbusters was big in our bunk — mostly, I assume, from the animated TV series based on the 1984 movie (Slimer and the Real Ghostbusters) rather than the movie itself. So I chaperone a few boys into the restroom. Two of them stand at the same urinal, pants down, focused on doing what you do. One suddenly exclaims “Don’t cross the streams!” and they crack up so hard it’s a miracle that no mopping was required.

I think Harold Ramis, who died this past Monday at 69, would’ve been proud. Godspeed, ghosts, gophers, and groundhogs be with him.