I'm surprised at the number of people that didn't know she was dead, she was on Happy Days for a couple of season and died sometime during that run. Heck my bartender was commenting on how unsettling the commercial was.

I have never watched horror movies. I have never understood the appeal.

If they are successful, the purpose is to shock, horrify, or scare you. If they don't, they just bore you.

In my life, there have been times that I have been shocked, horrified or scared. I don't recall them fondly. Why would I want to re-live them?

I also don't read celebrity magazines and I skip over celebrity news on television, newspapers, etc.

So count me among the people who, if he had ever about this girl, her role in the movie, or how she did, had long since forgot.

At the same time, I recognize that there are plenty of people who are up on this sort of thing. I suppose I should be surprised that the people who made the commercial did not consider the reaction they would have, but the fact is that these people are so busy being clever, and being proud of themselves for being clever, that those thoughts usually don't occur to them.

Man, I'm sick of that gimmick. In the last couple of years, it seems like you can't have a drama without half the episodes starting with a non sequitur scene and then a caption saying "Two Weeks Earlier..."

I really hate that, too, in general. In fact, an involuntary, quite loud, "oh no" escapes my lips every time. I actually had people turn around and stare at me in the theater about 30 seconds into Iron Man.

Greg Pope you are an evil man. That Digital Archive link, particularly the MST3K files, could pose is significant barrier to me getting anything done in the next several months...


Oh yeah. I already spent my time...

My only problem was that when I tried to put the MST3K onto Video CD's (they're the right size), a number of them didn't work. I've since converted them to Tivo files and put them on my spare hard drive.

I'm nervous to see if Parker Lewis is as funny as I remember it.

You got lucky. As far as I'm concerned, talking during Iron Man should be a hanging offense.

...or the lucky penny episode where they explore cause, effect and uncertainty.

Even that one was a callback to an earlier episode where he found the penny, I think.

The slapbet penalty has been legen... wait for it ...dary. They had the episode where Marshall got the 5 slaps. Then they didn't mention it at all for a number of episodes, until popping it up completely out of the blue during Barney's one-man show. Then they waited a bunch more shows, then did a whole show concentrating on it. Then nothing since.

The writers don't feel the need to hit us over the head with stuff, they assume that we remember things, and the characters (even Barney) behave realistically.

Exploiting her death disturbs me, down to my very bowels.

The slapbet penalty has been legen... wait for it ...dary. They had the episode where Marshall got the 5 slaps. Then they didn't mention it at all for a number of episodes, until popping it up completely out of the blue during Barney's one-man show. Then they waited a bunch more shows, then did a whole show concentrating on it. Then nothing since.

This is good as long as the shows stand on their own and you don't have to have watched literally every previous episode to know what the heck everyone is referring to.

A lot of these new shows are basically made exclusively for watching on DVD, with the initial TV showing being more like publicity than an effort to actually entertain people. I tried watching "Mad Men" this year, and missed a couple episodes, and when I came back I think the entire episode consisted of the guy with the beard showing up at a party with his black girlfriend, and a couple women reacting to that, and Don Draper's wife's car breaking down, and the red-haired office woman being annoyed that the secretaries found out her real age. Maybe I'm mixing a few episodes together, but the point is that none of these things were related to each other, and none of them seemed to have much significance in and of themselves, so I just gave up and am going to wait for the DVD.